Today I upgraded my Lightroom to 2.0 and re-confirmed my commitment to the software with my wallet. I promised myself to work through my internal resistance to change workflow, and now I am narrowing my excuses. Adobe is doing a great job of hyping the new release, and I am always a sucker for a good sales pitch (bought a few Magic Bullets a while back). I've started going down the Lightroom path at least 3 times, and now I am going again.
There are several big mental obstacles to overcome and it means just setting one's mind to the task and doing it. Old habits are hard to break and this old dog needs to learn some new tricks. The first big rock to overcome is convincing yourself that your existing tools and ways just cannot accommodate what you want to do. Here is my situation:
I have been shooting digitally since 2004 and have amassed around 280 GB of photos, mostly RAW, numbering in the neighborhood of 28,000 images. These are all organized on several external HDDs, my 1 TB drive has everything as a master archive, a 250 GB has 2007/2008 and is my "working" drive, and an additional 160 GB drive has 2006-2004.
I am tired of looking for images based on memory of when and where they were taken. As I venture into selling stock, I need to be able to not only find images but keywording is essential. If I take the time to title, caption, and keyword an image I only want to do this one time for all eternity, and I need a place where this can be done efficiently and in an organized way. I'm not going to re-enter the same title for my pBase site, Zenfolio site, PhotoShelter, etc.
Although Canon DPP has served me well, it is time to move on. The editing tools in LR are far superior, and the integration with Photoshop is designed to help your workflow. I'm looking forward to the upgrade.