From iPhoto to Lightroom

Over the last few weeks week I’ve been transitioning from iPhoto to Lightroom. The reason I did this was because using iPhoto on my machine with my massive photo library had become incredibly slow and frustrating.

Just after Fun Fun Fun Fest, I had edited the photos from the festival with iPhoto, and had uploaded a photo essay to a local website. However, I never uploaded the rest of the photos from the festival to Flickr, because my iPhoto was so overwhelmed with my thousands of pictures that it crashed whenever I tried to do anything.

When tech support imported my photo library to Lightroom, they didn’t come with any of the edits I had made before. (This is something I knew was going to happen with anyone doing an iPhoto to Lightroom import.)

Since SXSW I’ve partially been teaching myself (after watching these videos) how to use Lightroom by re-editing the pictures from Fun Fun Fun Fest, and uploading them to Flickr. Somehow it seems easier to learn a new software using a batch of pictures that I’d edited before. (I’ve also had a cold since SXSW ended, so re-editing pictures seems to take less brain capacity.)

So far Lightroom (with my photo library on a Thunderbolt drive) seems far more stable than my old iPhoto setup.

I wish I understood what all the buttons did, but that will come someday!