Upgrading to Adobe Lightroom 3

One of the main aspects (these days) in photograph is the ability to post-process your photos in an easy and manageable way. There are a few different pieces of software out there to help organize and edit your photos but I have typically used Adobe Lightroom and with the recent release of version 3.0, I thought it would be time to perform the upgrade. Hoping nothing goes wrong with upgrading the various catalogs, I jumped right into it.

The cool thing about Adobe products is that you can download the 30-day trial and it is the exact same thing as the regular retail version, but obviously expires after 30 days. You can purchase a retail key for the 30-day trial version if you so choose to do so. I find that I like being able to download these trials off the manufactures website as opposed to going to the store to purchase the box and CD/DVD. I prefer the less packaging approach to software and if I ever corrupt the install, I can just re-download the 30-day trial and enter my key to activate it.

The Process

If you want to download the 30-day trial of Adobe Lightroom 3.0, just check out Adobe’s product section and choose your flavour (PC/Mac).

Once downloaded you can go ahead and install via the executable. Since I have a Windows based box, these will be Windows based screenshots, I am sure the Mac version is similar in the way installation goes.

I’m not going to show each and every screenshot associated with the installing of a Windows based product because it is a typical install. Nothing seems to be different between this and another piece of software. One part is a tad different, but I will mention it when it comes to it.

It seems that the installer is fairly smart and installed the 64-bit version of Lightroom, I didn’t think about it at first actually, but I do prefer to use my 64-bit environment to it’s full extent. It doesn’t take very long to check existing files or to begin installing. It does ask you where to install the files and does install separately from previous versions.

Update Existing Catalog on Install

The only difference with this particular install is that during the install process it will ask you to update your current catalog. This is the catalog you previously had open when you used the previous version of Lightroom.

If you have been running  a previous version of Lightroom, it will ask you to update the current existing catalog. The process can be fairly lengthy depending on how large your catalog is. To give you an idea how long an upgrading of a catalog can be, it probably took 5-7 minutes to upgrade my main catalog which is 317MB in size with over 20,000 photos in it. I do take a lot of photos don’t I? Of course if you don’t have an existing catalog, you would just choose to create a new one.

A simple progress bar showing you an estimated time and length of the upgrading catalog process.

Finished!

Once the upgrade is complete it’s all ready to go! I haven’t actually gone through the latest features of this new version but I am sure I will pretty soon.

It was a pretty quick and painless upgrade. The only other thing to note is that any other catalogs you might have, will need to be upgraded when you switch to them.

Updating an Existing Catalog

When you want to switch to another catalog, it will ask you to update it to the latest version as well. It’s pretty simple and painless and you are prompted by the following screen.

In this case, I wanted to look through my photos of this year’s Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival up in Whistler. Don’t mind the catalog name, I must have been confused as to what year it was when I created the catalog name. I’m sure it is a fairly easy fix, but I just haven’t bothered to correct that little mistake.

Since this particular catalog wasn’t as big as my main catalog it took less time to update. I love easy processes.

So that’s it! I’ve upgraded from Adobe Lightroom 2.6 to Lightroom 3.0. Now I can go and remove Lightroom 2.6 and any other previous version I might still have sitting around on my machine.

What do you use for your organizing and post-processing of photos? If you’re not using Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, I do recommend checking either of them out. Unfortunately, Apple’s Aperture isn’t available for Windows, but does integrate nicely with iPhoto if you are used to using that on you Mac.