P: Support cataloging PNG files in Lightroom

Which makes more business sense—thwarting people in smug superiority? Or saying "Woohoo, new custimrz, how can we help them?"

Lightroom works reasonably well as a general-purpose asset manager, how about letting that happen instead of resisting? (maybe add a multi-user version too?)

Or is there some other product you're protecting by keeping Lightroom crippled?

Typical: We wrote our program to do X, therefore if you want to use it to do X.1 or X.2 or even Y, you are just plain out of luck. Stupid user: trying to use Lightroom for anything but raw pictures coming out of a compact flash card....... Innovation comes by LISTENING to users, not by sitting in your dark cubical and deciding what it is people should do with your software.

Correction: Photoshop is not just for photographers (the comment cited was aim at Photoshop, NOT Lightroom). Lightroom *is* just for photographers. And that is the rationale for excluding support for importing png: they don't come from cameras. But, it seems so easy to implement png support, and useful to photographers who have pngs too, that it seems it would be a nice convenience, even if not justifiable by the stricter of the purists.

The best solution havable in the mean time is Jim Keir's solution (see above). But that would be for Windows only.

Interesting to see and get many of definitive responses and defensive comments..... for example - Lightroom isn't for photographers.... I sometimes wonder about some of these comments. Just to see how adamant and "defensive" some people get about it their comments is humorous.

In real life many people do indeed use Lightroom as a workflow management tool and catalog images - their source: cameras. If this is not photography I don't know what it is?

The problem as I see and experience it is that Lightroom can be used as an effective tool in many ways, The issue I have is that sometimes source files you receive - be it for web work, or whatever (not really that relevant) may be in a PNG format. Having Lightroom not accept that format is a handicap, especially when other Adobe product will accept it. For an application workflow - I may just want to import so I can do a bulk export to another format (part of a workflow - which is what Lightroom is partly about). Why restrict it source file especially when it is so common. That is the only point I am making.

Photoshop isn't for photography. A few percent of it is.

Really, really need PNG format. Photoshop has it, so to say it is not ideal for Photography would mean it should not be in Photoshop as well. Way too many things (we based) that use PNG, and not being able to catalog things or for that matter import to catalog so you can export to another format make Lightroom really miss the boat on many things.

Did you click the '+1' button above?

I would like to give my vote for png.

Cataloging PNG files would indeed be very helpful.

I ran into this recently when working on a product photography shoot for leather jackets. We required images of the products with the background removed (transparent) so that we can process them further (add a certain background, stack them up, etc.).

I received the files in transparent PNG format, which suits me greatly as I use Fireworks primarily. However, they needed some additional retouching, like adjusting black levels, removing highlights, etc, that Lightroom is best at.

Upon trying to import them into Lightroom, I realized that I can't, since it doesn't support PNG files.

I had to open them up in Photoshop to do what I needed, but that wasn't very convenient. Fortunately, there were only about 10 files... but what if I had to to deal with 100 shots and I wanted to apply the same settings to all files?

So my vote goes to including PNG support in Lightroom please. Thanks!

Ironically Chris Cox brought up the best point in support of PNG inclusion for Lightroom. PNG is simple in comparison to TIFF. That is the whole point of the need for full size PNG file support. One description I read of TIFF is that TIFF files are just a container. From that point you can go all over the place in variations on it. Like 50 plus versions maybe, that's a guess. A TIFF file is not a like a musical recording it's more of an instrument to play. I also read that many proprietary RAW files began their development out of TIFF format, which makes sense. A container is perfect to play around in. That said, I do like TIFFs in the midst of the work flow but not the end of it. If many common imaging programs get used on the same computer, then periodically a TIFF made with one will be unreadable by other programs. Also, on the web, when you upload a TIFF to Flickr they convert it to a JPG automatically and your full size original becomes unavailable to download even if you wanted it to be available. If I save as a large PNG file, and because for some crazy reason many image editing programs will cut the EXIF off a PNG save, and I use a software program to append the EXIF to it, then the full original sized photo is available on Flickr for view or download, with the EXIF. Flickr uses open source cross platform "ExifTool" among others to read EXIF so even if Lightroom didn't keep the EXIF on the PNG during export there would be workarounds for that but Adobe could take the lead and provide full size PNG with EXIF saves. Finally I would like to see all my photos in the Lightroom organizer. Many of my final versions from long edits are invisible to me in Lightroom. That is acceptable to me when I use freeware Nikon View NX2 for raw conversion but for a paid program I'd like to make the request for full PNG support.