Lightroom Classic Book Module
I'm not sure if the things I'm about to say is bug report or a feature request, a tantrum attack...or a little bit of everything. I'm a hobbyist photographer with quite an extensive background in photography and software development. The past month I have spent quite a lot of time trying to put together a photobook with images I took at my recent photography workshop(Jan 2022) with Colby Brown. The book I put together had about 240 images spread across a 213 page book. I used the largest landscape layout Blurb will allow to design my book. The drive to post this message to the community was the fact that I almost lost a whole month of work. When I was about 90% done LR just "lost" all but 6 pages of my work and I was 2 seconds away from a heart attack :-). To cut a long story short after restoring a 48 hr old backup and working for 2 days I managed to restore the book.
A couple of things I want to recommend to anyone trying this module:
-Export to PDF regularly
-Change the setting on your catalog to backup on exit
-Take a chill pill cause working with this module is not easy
A couple of things to the nice people who charge me for hundreds of dollars over the years presumably for this under developed archaic piece of forgotten software:
1. Build a new layout interface - It should be easier to much easier to save new layouts into groups, I would recommend using the left side which is hardly used
2. Going back and from the library and development module should not require reselecting the book collection every time and if you forget, take you to another empty collection leaving you thinking something went wrong every time and loosing time in the process. At least an user option go back to last collection
3. If you jump into development module to fix an image while “unused” filter was on should not show a black page until you turn the filter of at the bottom right corner every time
4. Selection is far from being perfect at times selecting the Photo text is really difficult
5. Selecting different fonts is very difficult and time consuming trying different font options
6. No option for first line indent…missing lots of text styling options
7. No way to change a photo angle…very useful for stickers and illustrations
8. Limited number of frame options for photo and no way to add more of your own
9. Very important - very limited global options for a book - for example change a base font for the whole book. Based on title, page text descriptions etc’. Very time consuming changing each photo and page individually
10. No alignment or copying layouts options - align center align together. There is a limited “copy layout” that does not work as expected!
11. No options for e-book export kindle etc
12. No option for powerpoint, web etc’ exports
13. No spelling correction
14. No diagnostics analysis
I’m sure there are a lot more feature requests I can think of but I will stop here. It’s important to say this module is extremely important and a missed opportunity. There is no better place for this module than inside LR. The main reason is the size of the screen, the computation power and the ability to organize and jump back and forth between post processing phote tweaks and the book text and design. If Adobe find this module to be an unnecessary burden or cost for development(the same goes for the other modules) please remove it and show us where to go next…!
AdChoices