I went to a seminar the other day, sponsored by Apple, and they seem to have some speed advantages. I don't own either. I believe it depends on what you use as a work station, although others may have varying opinions.

Personally I've seen Phase One's Capture one being used with Apple Powerbook and shooting tethered seems to me what pros want. Capture one seems to work well as editing.

Adobe Photoshop's Bridge works fine, if you just want basic viewing and selection. I think everything depends on how much memory and processor speed you got, and whether or not you need speed adjusting changes for whole bunch of images at once.

An instructor at a recent Adobe workshop said that a lot of people tend to treat Lightroom as sort of Bridge on steroids. I can definitely see how this could be true. But it certainly does plenty more as you probably know.

I only just recently switched over to it (from Nikon Picture Project, which shipped with my camera) and am already really happy with the advanced organizational features and flexibility. And a friend of mine with something like 10,000 photos spread across multiple disks and computers, without much of a system, is getting a handle on her chaos with Lightroom. I'm going to say we've been pretty happy with it so far.

It does seem a little slow on screen--Lightroom 1.4 seems to be less responsive and have slower redraw than Photoshop CS 2.

Good luck!

Ken

Jenny,

I considered the same questions as you recently, and ultimately opted for Apple's Aperture 2. I can describe how my thinking on this went, but your situation may vary considerably from mine, so with that as context, your needs might well be different. My situation is the management of some 0.6 million belly dance photos that had grown to ~4TB in size, and it was getting to be that I could not find any one any more. So, I was looking for a tool for refederating a huge photo stock from multiple fractional TB disks to new large 1TB disks in an orderly way, so that I could find the belly dancers of specific events, years, and photo shoots, etc.

I did like Bridge with Photoshop CS3 somewhat as a means to engage photos for editing, but definitely did not like it as a storage management tool. It seemed somewhat better than an average photo thumbnail program, but I am finding Preview (on the newer Mac OS X Leopard) quite usable in that regard, so I use Bridge a lot less now.

I read reviews or user-experience reports on both products, and what influenced me more toward Aperture was the facilities it has for management of large numbers of photos, and less it's editing tools. I read about Lightroom's general design being influenced by a photographic user base, but several people reported that while it did many things, it would not really replace Photoshop. That was kind of how I had sized it up, and given reported speed increases with the database model that Aperture 2 uses over the prior version (1.5, I think), I decided on Aperture. I was however pleasantly surprised at the photo editing features of Aperture, particularly for camera raw. Nicely enough you can easily use it to call out an external editor. I was able to call either Photoshop, or LightZone, for individual edits (though it presumes you want one or the other, I've not figured out whether it's menu configurable for selecting either editor on demand, at present the choice is only a default in preferences).

So far, I've imported tens of thousands of photos from my collection, and the process of using them via Aperture is working quite well. There is some initial setup "pain," like waiting for thumbnails to be painted, but that would certainly be true with any photo management tool. What I found quite rewarding so far is how easily and recallable specific photos are, using this tool. It certainly works well and efficiently with metadata, and that's exactly what I needed. I also like the managed storage model of Aperture, which lets you make archives on removable media that are still searchable and usable later.

I did consider briefly obtaining both tools and just seeing which I liked better, but I liked Aperture 2 well enough that it seemed folly to buy two perhaps similar tools for the same job. So, in that regard, I cannot report on Lightroom, but perhaps another photographer on this Tribe who uses it can give her/his report on that clearly capable tool. Hope this input is otherwise helpful to you. If you have a specific question that I could maybe answer, please just PM me.

Blessings and Light,
Michael

B&H Photo now has an online review of Adobe's Lightroom 2:
www.bhphotovideo.com/c/find/...om-2.jsp

Blessings and Light,
M