Adobe is Listening!
I met up with Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty yesterday in the halls of Adobe HQ out in San Jose, California and when I stopped him to talk for two seconds between meetings, he had in his hands a stack of paper; it was a print out of all the ideas you guys posted as comments to my “Lightroom 2.0 Wishlist” blog post from last Friday. 
Tom had emailed me a nice note just a few hours after I had released my wishlist post on Friday, but I was even more excited to see with my own eyes how seriously Adobe was taking your suggestions and ideas. I wasn’t at all surprised—just totally psyched! Tom did his own follow-up post last night on the Adobe “Lightroom Journal” Blog (Tips and advice straight from the Lightroom team) and you can read it right here.
Thanks to everyone who posted such great ideas here last week, and a special thanks to the entire Lightroom team at Adobe for their dedication to their customers and for working to make a truly great product even better.
Unbelievable!!! It is so incredibly comforting to hear that the big players really are listening to the end user and working to provide a product that ‘fits all’. With Adobe, NAPP and Kelby Training it seems to me that the only reason for not getting the end result we desire is simply down to not taking advantage of what is available for us all.
Thanks Scott to you and everyone else involved in developing such a creative enviroment – personally speaking I know I owe alot of the growth in my business during 2007 to you guys.
Best wishes to you and yours,
Glyn
Any chance you could convince Adobe to just go right to the Special Hardware Modifications mentioned in Tom’s Blog. That might make the wait for additional features a little easier.
Keep up the good work!
It is really heartening to learn that big companies like Adobe are listening to
their software users.
Anyway, Lightroom is the best thing to have happened to me in a long time..
Best wishes
Bakul
That’s just awesome! My heart skipped a beat when I read the title, it’s just wonderful. Now lets hope for most of the features we want to come in there
Now if Nikon would only do the same with NX and it’s products. Come to think of it, what about Aperture 2.0?
Yes, John Nack mentioned on his blog something about there’s a Lightroom community in the works. And he had some interesting things to say about program development. http://blogs.adobe.com/
And your to-do list is posted there too.
“New Lightroom community help system On behalf of Anita and the rest of the Adobe Documentation team, I’m pleased to announce the new Lightroom community help system…”
I had a feeling that posting might serve as a useful conduit to Adobe for some ideas on LR features. Cruising through the 7 points Scott – even put a before/after up on my NAPP portfolio page if you got a minute to check it out…(gotta be a NAPP member to know the reasons, eh?
)
PSUTV interviews seemed rather short this week. Would like to have heard more from them, but I guess time was a limiting factor. Looking forward to Digital Photography 2.0 as well. I have no idea how you produce such a prodigious volume of written material so consistently! Keep up the great work though!
Regards,
Jason Anderson
Here’s one more suggestion from a question posted at the LR Forum at NAPP. During the download process you can check the option to create a backup file of the images. LR is hardwired to automatically name the folder by date. There is no option to change that. Instead, it should have the same behavior as Exporting images does.
its not related to this post, but checkout http://www.photacute.com, I’d be interested in hearing you’re take on it
Scott, you should check out the thread started in the LR section of the NAPP forums.
Hi Scott,
Unlike cell phone providers, it is nice to see companies like Adobe & NAPP actually take customer suggestions seriously.
Keep up the good work on all you do. You & NAPP make the world a much better place.
THANK YOU!!!
Mike
Thanks for the good news Scott, this makes me happy inside
Cool to hear! But, think about, if they (or any company) didn’t listen to their customers, how do they expect to make more money by NOT giving them what they want?
Now…..when will Photoshop and video editing software merge?
*hint hint*
Can Adobe also listen to the fact that my Lightroom is only importing half the pictures on my memory card before ejecting it and saying it did them all. It has done this for the last 5 times, running the latest version in Mac OS 10.5 using SanDisk Extreme III SD cards.
I am having to copy the data to the desktop and re-import every time and it is extremely annoying and time consuming *Sigh*
One thing I would like to see in Lightroom is some type of virtual library.
I’m not even sure how this would technically work but I like to keep my photos in multiple librarys to keep it fairly easy to manage. I originally tried to keep all of my photos in a single library but that turned out to be slow.
I have this rough idea of when I want to, being able to open “this virtual library” where I could simultaneously open as many individual librarys at once.
This could keep my regular librarys small for when I want to organize, keyword, develop, etc but also allow me to search across all my photos when I’m looking for something that may not be specific to a library (shoot, trip, etc) and I’m not sure which library it may be in.
Adobe is definitely listening, and not just to Lightroom requests. It’s absolutely common for me to require my team members to spend 10-20% of their time out in the community. Not just product managers, but software engineers and software quality engineers…everyone.
I really don’t understand why every software company doesn’t do this. It is harder, and it is definitely difficult not to be able to accomplish everything our customers want, but it’s critical if we are going to meet our customers’ needs.
One thing I will say, is that it takes some thick skin to read all the criticisms of our “beloved babies” that we poured so much sweat and tears into…but in the end it is all worth it to see what our customers create (in part) using our tools.
I say this all the time — Adobe has the best customers in the world!
Cheers,
Dave Story
VP Product Development
Creative Solutions, Adobe Systems