Tom Hogarty has announced that Lightroom 2.1 will be released later today. So stay tuned…

Timothy Armes has released a new version of his LT/Transporter plug-in. Now up to version 3, LR/Transporter “… is a Lightroom export plug-in that allows you make use of the metadata embedded in your photos. In parallel to the exportation of the photos themselves this plugin may generate a “companion” text file for each exported photo as well as an overall summary file. These files are built to your own specification from the metadata embedded in the photos.”

via Lightroom News

Eric Scouten, one of the Lightroom Development team has written about how he organises his Lightroom Catalog, with some sensible advice.

Jeffrey Friedl has launched another in his series of popular and successful Lightroom Plug-ins. This time it is one that allows you to perform a proximity search based on the locations geoencoded into your images. Full instructions here and kudos to Jeffrey for another great plug-in.

Note: This article appears on the Focal Press site, and a version of it also appears Inside Lightroom 2: The serious photographer’s guide to Lightroom efficiency, which is published on October 29th in the US and November 9th in the UK

With image libraries getting bigger all the time the need to rename files just to keep up with the numbers is increasingly important.

Fortunately, the renaming scheme in Lightroom is very powerful, so you are able to create custom, token-based naming systems with ease.

As you can see from the diagram, you are able to use a combination of text and tokens for your naming system.
The above example shows a renaming scheme I use for my Keeper files from one of my cameras, the Canon EOS 400D. The sequence is:

400D_<Sequence # (00001)>_<Date (YYYY)>.<Date (MM)>.<Date (DD)><suffix>

which equates to

400D_00001_2008.09.10.dng

This will give a naming system that will last for 99,999 images (this is the maximum allowable under this token based system), which you would think would be enough! But imagine you are a photographer such as Vincent Laforet, who recently shot the Beijing Olympics. He returned with 28,444 images see http://tinyurl.com/57k6ny 3.5 shoots of that magnitude and you run out of numbers.
You could approach this with a manual hack and add an extra number at the beginning of the token, so that now the dialog box would look like this.

400D_0<Sequence # (00001)>_<Date (YYYY)>.<Date (MM)>.<Date (DD)><suffix>

which equates to

400D_000001_2008.09.10.dng

And this system will give you up to 999,999 images, enough for 35 Olympic-sized shoots without further manual intervention. Because when you then hit 1,000,000 images, you will have to manually change the sequence again.

It would be so much easier if this could be done automatically. By editing the Preset in a text editor we can achieve this.

So, to begin this process you will need a text editor, Notepad on Windows, or TextWrangler on the Mac are ideal (you need a plain text editor rather than a rich text editor.

Next you will need to locate your Filename Templates folder, these are stored in the following locations:

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Filename Templates

XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Filename Templates

Vista: /AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Lightroom/Filename Templates

On Windows these may be in protected locations, so you will need to show all files to reach these folders.

Inside the Filename Templates folder there will be the custom naming preset, in this case 400D Keepers Name Structure.lrtemplate. Open this file in your text editor and you will see what a Filename Template looks like!

This file is a Lua Script file, Lua is the open source scripting language that is used for a lot of front end communication in Lightroom), unlike, say, an XMP file which is written in XML, this has more of a programmers’ procedural language structure about it, but don’t let that put you off, it is not too hard to work out what is meant in the file.

If we look at the main section of the file we will see some familiar terms; they are the Lua equivalent of our tokens that we created in the Rename editor in Lightroom.

     "400D_",
      {
       value = "naming_sequenceNumber_5Digits",
      },
       "_",
      {
       value = "date_YYYY",
      },
      ".",
      {
       value = "date_MM",
      },
      ".",
      {
       value = "date_DD",
      },

Each of the tokens is expressed as ‘value  =  “XX”’ and each of the text-based objects is simply “quoted”.

The one token that interests us here is the one that says:

value = "naming_sequenceNumber_5Digits",

Simply change this to:

value = "naming_sequenceNumber_9Digits",

and save the file. Note that if you want to retain your old Preset you will have to change the following items in the file as well, or there will be a clash.

Change

  name = "Keepers Name Structure",
  presetType = "Naming",
 },
 "AgTokenPresets",
 "restoreTokenFromArchivedState",
},
internalName = "400D Keepers Name Structure",
title = "400D Keepers Name Structure",

to the following

  name = "Keepers Extended Name Structure",
  presetType = "Naming",
 },
 "AgTokenPresets",
 "restoreTokenFromArchivedState",
},
internalName = "400D Keepers Extended Name Structure",
title = "400D Keepers Extended Name Structure",

Then save the file as: 400D Keepers Extended Name Structure.lrtemplate

Open or restart Lightroom, select a file in the Library, press F2, or select Library > Rename Photos…. In the resulting dialog, select 400D Keepers Extended Name Structure and you will see that we can now rename with up to 9 digits.

So this small change to a Presets allows us to happily rename up to 999,999,999 images, or 35,156 Olympic shoots!

Note: This article appears on the Focal Press site, and a version of it also appears Inside Lightroom 2:The serious photographer’s guide to Lightroom efficiency, which is published on October 29th in the US and November 9th in the UK

With image libraries getting bigger all the time the need to rename files just to keep up with the numbers is increasingly important.

Fortunately, the renaming scheme in Lightroom is very powerful, so you are able to create custom, token-based naming systems with ease.

As you can see from the diagram, you are able to use a combination of text and tokens for your naming system.
The above example shows a renaming scheme I use for my Keeper files from one of my cameras, the Canon EOS 400D. The sequence is:

400D_<Sequence # (00001)>_<Date (YYYY)>.<Date (MM)>.<Date (DD)><suffix>

which equates to

400D_00001_2008.09.10.dng

This will give a naming system that will last for 99,999 images (this is the maximum allowable under this token based system), which you would think would be enough! But imagine you are a photographer such as Vincent Laforet, who recently shot the Beijing Olympics. He returned with 28,444 images see http://tinyurl.com/57k6ny 3.5 shoots of that magnitude and you run out of numbers.
You could approach this with a manual hack and add an extra number at the beginning of the token, so that now the dialog box would look like this.

400D_0<Sequence # (00001)>_<Date (YYYY)>.<Date (MM)>.<Date (DD)><suffix>

which equates to

400D_000001_2008.09.10.dng

And this system will give you up to 999,999 images, enough for 35 Olympic-sized shoots without further manual intervention. Because when you then hit 1,000,000 images, you will have to manually change the sequence again.

It would be so much easier if this could be done automatically. By editing the Preset in a text editor we can achieve this.

So, to begin this process you will need a text editor, Notepad on Windows, or TextWrangler on the Mac are ideal (you need a plain text editor rather than a rich text editor.

Next you will need to locate your Filename Templates folder, these are stored in the following locations:

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Filename Templates

XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Filename Templates

Vista: /AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Lightroom/Filename Templates

On Windows these may be in protected locations, so you will need to show all files to reach these folders.

Inside the Filename Templates folder there will be the custom naming preset, in this case 400D Keepers Name Structure.lrtemplate. Open this file in your text editor and you will see what a Filename Template looks like!

This file is a Lua Script file, Lua is the open source scripting language that is used for a lot of front end communication in Lightroom), unlike, say, an XMP file which is written in XML, this has more of a programmers’ procedural language structure about it, but don’t let that put you off, it is not too hard to work out what is meant in the file.

If we look at the main section of the file we will see some familiar terms; they are the Lua equivalent of our tokens that we created in the Rename editor in Lightroom.

     "400D_",
      {
       value = "naming_sequenceNumber_5Digits",
      },
       "_",
      {
       value = "date_YYYY",
      },
      ".",
      {
       value = "date_MM",
      },
      ".",
      {
       value = "date_DD",
      },

Each of the tokens is expressed as ‘value  =  “XX”’ and each of the text-based objects is simply “quoted”.

The one token that interests us here is the one that says:

value = "naming_sequenceNumber_5Digits",

Simply change this to:

value = "naming_sequenceNumber_9Digits",

and save the file. Note that if you want to retain your old Preset you will have to change the following items in the file as well, or there will be a clash.

Change

  name = "Keepers Name Structure",
  presetType = "Naming",
 },
 "AgTokenPresets",
 "restoreTokenFromArchivedState",
},
internalName = "400D Keepers Name Structure",
title = "400D Keepers Name Structure",

to the following

  name = "Keepers Extended Name Structure",
  presetType = "Naming",
 },
 "AgTokenPresets",
 "restoreTokenFromArchivedState",
},
internalName = "400D Keepers Extended Name Structure",
title = "400D Keepers Extended Name Structure",

Then save the file as: 400D Keepers Extended Name Structure.lrtemplate

Open or restart Lightroom, select a file in the Library, press F2, or select Library > Rename Photos…. In the resulting dialog, select 400D Keepers Extended Name Structure and you will see that we can now rename with up to 9 digits.

So this small change to a Presets allows us to happily rename up to 999,999,999 images, or 35,156 Olympic shoots!

Photoshop CS4 has been released with Camera Raw 5; this offers Lightroom 2.0 parity. However, Tom Hogarty mentions that a 5.1 update will happen next week to add support for some of the new cameras released recently.

Eric Chan has mentioned in this post, that Adobe are preparing a beta 2 release of camera profiles which will be released soon via the Adobe Labs site.

Scott Kelby’s latest post, As Photographers, Are We Backing Up Too Much? touches on a crucial aspect of workflow and storage. In essence, what are you going to do with all those photos that are not Picks or Keepers?

I, like Scott and Terry White, mentioned in the blog post, keep everything, but am forever fighting with diminishing disk space - and this is with 4.5 TB of storage!

My workflow is that anything rated with a star or more in Lightroom is a “Keeper”; so what am I doing with all the zeros? Well at the moment keeping them, but recently my thinking has been aligning with Scott’s, is it worth keeping them?

Every so often I will traverse the zeros and see if there is something I have missed, but perhaps 10% of them might be upgraded so that leaves a big fat 90% clogging up the Catalog.

Perhaps the solution is to Export them all to another catalog, and store that on DVD or Blu-Ray, and delete them from the main Catalog, so keeping the storage requirements at a more manageable level and making your Catalog leaner.

Interesting to hear everyone’s thoughts, both here and on Scott’s blog.

After a few weeks on Adobe Labs, Adobe Camera Raw 4.6 has been released.

It is available for Mac and Windows

It includes support for 15 new cameras:

• Canon 1000D (Digital Rebel XS/EOS Kiss F) 

• Canon 50D

• Fuji FinePix IS Pro

• Kodak EasyShare Kodak Z1015 IS

• Leaf AFi II 6

• Leaf AFi II 7

• Leaf Aptus II 6

• Leaf Aptus II 7

• Nikon D700

• Nikon D90

• Nikon Coolpix P6000

• Olympus SP-565 UZ

• Pentax K2000 (K-m) 

• Sigma DP1

• Sony A900