Timing of Lightroom releases

A frequently asked question is, when will the next release of Lightroom come out?  A related question is, how long will it be before my new camera is supported by Lightroom? 

Adobe almost never comments on the timing of future releases, and anyone who knows the date of the next release isn’t allowed to disclose it.  But in the nine years that Lightroom has been available, Adobe has been reasonably consistent in the timing of its releases.  Thus, we can use past history to make reasonable guesstimates of the near future.

Here’s a summary of Lightroom’s major and minor releases:

Major Weeks gives the number of weeks between major releases (e.g. there were 75 weeks between 1.0 and 2.0). On average, a new major version of LR comes out every 85 weeks (1.6 years).

Minor Days gives the average number of days between minor releases (e.g. between 6.3 and 6.4). Prior to version 6, minor releases came out on average every 93 days.  But in version 6, they’ve come out more frequently, 56 days on average.  I’m counting as a “minor release” any release that contains support for new cameras; that includes 5.7.1 and 6.1.1, but excludes the “patch releases” 6.0.1 and 6.2.1 that contained urgent quick fixes to bugs in the prior releases.  Even if we didn’t count 6.1.1 as a minor release (it included support for 16 new cameras), the minor release cycle for version 6 would still be 70 days, much more frequent than previous versions.

Here’s a graph showing the timing of all major and minor releases of both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw:

Note that major releases of LR and ACR don’t go in precise lockstep.

A lot of interest (and some frustration) is expressed in this forum about the delay between when a new camera comes out and a new version of Lightroom that supports the camera. To understand Adobe’s past behavior, I analyzed all the newly supported cameras in LR 5 and 6, 158 in all.  The following table shows how quickly LR supported new cameras from each of the manufacturers:

Overall, about 78% of all new camera models got supported in the first LR release after the manufacturer’s official announcement (release cycle 1). About 16% of new models didn't get supported until the second release after the announcement (release cycle 2).

New Canons got supported quickly – 90% of new models appeared in the next release of LR.

But only 77% of Sony models and 73% of Fujifilm models appeared in the next release of LR.

A few cameras got supported in release cycle 0, meaning the date of the manufacturer’s official announcement was after the date of the LR release containing support for the camera.  (I generally used the date of the press releases as published in Dpreview.com.)  Perhaps Adobe had access to pre-announcement cameras.