Thursday November 20
 
14:46
 
Photo Organisation On Macs 4 - Screwed Up Lightroom

I thought I had found the ultimate workflow but I’ve become more and more frustrated with Lightroom 2 recently. Until now it was just frustration, but not any more. Today Lightroom crashed and when restarted I was presented with this:

“An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”

I could no longer access my library of 55,000 photos.

What was I doing at the time? Updating metadata - eg, updating Location to be Hong Kong, Korea, Japan - and then writing that back to the JPEGs and XMP files. Last night Lightroom required Force Quit several times after getting its knickers in a twist when doing that; today it quit itself.

I finally managed to fix the problem by upgrading to version 2.1 - but that doesn’t exactly give me confidence. I’ve seen reports of this problem in Lightroom 1.3 with people unable to fix it until 1.4 came out and things magically worked again. It would seem, then, that maybe the fundamental issue isn’t fixed and I just got lucky that 2.1 was available and cleaned things up. What if it happens again and can’t be fixed until 2.2? Adobe doesn’t seem to recognise the “change modules” error even though it appears to be widespread.

What really worries me is what Lightroom is doing to my photos. I’ve noticed several cases when I updated metadata on a group of photos only to discover a week or so later that the metadata has suddenly disappeared. If there are bugs in metadata handling - which I have set to write back to JPEGs - then it could really screw things up (it could overrun the data field of the JPEG header and corrupt the images themselves).

For the moment I have no better option than Lightroom - but I’m certainly not as enthused as I was before. I just hope 2.1 is a big improvement.

Update:

There are definitely still problems with metadata handling. For example, I added a new value to some photos for “State / Province”. Lightroom shows me that value has been added to the photo, but in the “Library Filter”, that value doesn’t appear. When I later return to the photo, the value is gone.

In other cases, the “needs updating” sign “…” isn’t shown even though metadata needs to be saved.

And now the damn thing has crashed again. Arse.