Lightroom vs Bridge and DAM

I’m reading The DAM Book, Peter Krogh’s excellent book on Digital Asset Management for photographers. He suggests that you use Adobe Bridge and iView MediaPro to manage your digital photos. But what about Adobe Lightoom and Apple Aperture?

When Krogh’s DAM book was published in 2006, Adobe Lightroom was still in beta and Adobe Photoshop CS3 was still in development. To make matters even more confusing, Microsoft purchased iView MediaPro recently.

I did a search for ‘lightroom vs bridge’ and found an interesting Q & A with Photoshop expert Scott Kelby. He suggests that you don’t use Bridge and Camera Raw!

I think Lightroom is significantly better than the Bridge for importing, sorting, comparing, adding keywords, editing metadata, viewing photos, and…well…I can’t think of anything the Bridge really does better for photographers than what the Library module of Lightroom does.

I had to find out if Krogh felt the same way as Kelby. On The DAM Book website forums, Krogh says this about Ligtroom 1.0:

…if you are a single computer user, without a large economic stake in your images, who does not already have some kind of DAM implemented, then Lightroom is probably just fine.

Krogh suggests that there are some problems with version 1 of Lightroom in terms of bugs and features that were left out due to time constraints. I can live with that. Lightroom is a product that will improve with time. I’d rather put my money behind an Adobe product than a Microsoft one that might not be supported on the Macintosh in 5 years.

The great thing about Krogh’s book is that you can apply his workflow methods to various software applications like Lightroom or even Aperture. So should you use Adobe Bridge and iView Media Pro as Krogh suggests? Or should you listen to Scott Kelby and go with Lightroom?

My money is on Adobe Lightroom.

Posted in OS X Software and Photography at 2:17 PM