The connectivity and sharing options are perhaps the most interesting. The editing tools are arranged in a narrow vertical strip on the right side of the screen. To edit an image, you double-click it and it opens in the same window. Ultimately, Adobe hopes to eliminate the drudgery of manual keywording, though you do still have the option of typing in your own. There are also Android and iOS Lightroom mobile apps, which also synchronize automatically with your online catalogĪt the top of the window is a filter bar which you can use to pick out images by rating, flag, type, keyword, camera used or location, and above that is a simple search bar which uses Adobe’s intelligent online ‘Sensei’ search engine to find images according to the subjects they contain. Within your albums, photos are displayed either as a regular thumbnail grid or as a welcome new Photo Grid display, which seamlessly tiles horizontal and vertical images into an attractive gapless layout. You can create a hierarchical filing system by storing albums within folders, but you can’t create ’Smart Albums’ based on search criteria in the way you can with Lightroom Classic. Once your photos are imported you can set about organizing them, and here Adobe has chosen a very simple and direct approach. Here, though, your images are uploaded to Adobe’s servers by default – though you can opt to have them stored locally too, via the Preferences panel. In the ‘old’ Lightroom (and Lightroom Classic), you can opt to keep your files where they are and have Lightroom ‘reference’ them in their current position.

Lightroom supports JPEGs, TIFF files, PSD (Photoshop) files, and raw files from a huge range of cameras. You click a ‘+’ button in the top-left corner of the screen and choose the folder you want to import from if you insert a memory card, Lightroom will offer to import images from that too. Essentially, there are four phases in the Lightroom workflow: importing, organizing, editing and sharing.

Cc lightroom