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The last major iteration of Lightroom was well over two years ago and an update has been overdue for a while. Adobe has just announced what it has been working on and it is going to be controversial. DPReview, no doubt with the other usual websites has a full overview, so I will simply summarise the main changes here.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/979335364 ... om-classic

The biggest change is that Lightroom is becoming a subscription only product. Lightroom 6 is the last version for which it is possible to purchase a perpetual licence. Adobe has only been supplying updates to Camera Raw for new cameras and that will cease at the end of the year. RIP Lightroom 6.

Lightroom CC, the subscription version of the Windows and Mac desktop software becomes Lightroom Classic CC. Adobe has been been reworking the code to improve performance, which many will welcome.

So far, so good for anyone who has committed to the former Lightroom CC. Now for the controversial bit. There is a new cloud based version, only available by subscription, which confusingly takes over the Lightroom CC moniker. Adobe has already been dipping its toes into those waters with Lightroom Mobile and this appears to be a development of that. The good news is that by being in the Cloud users' files will be available everywhere. The downside is the more images users upload, the greater the tie in to Adobe.

At present, the new Lightroom CC is not as fully featured as Lightroom Classic CC, but DPReview does not expect that to remain the case forever. The clue is in that Classic name. Lightroom CC is going to be the way forward and at some point Classic users are likely to be in a similar position as Lightroom 6 users are now. And that day might arrive sooner than you think.

There is another article on DPReview about the forthcoming demise of Lightroom 6 which pretty much sums up my views right now.

https://www.dpreview.com/opinion/543101 ... tion-model

The issue is that I have invested a lot of effort into developing a Lightroom catalog which allows me to manage my images. The immediate question for me is whether I wish to continue doing that in the longer term. The writer of the DPReview article says he is going to look for alternatives and I am certain that others will feel the same. I might well be switching to an alternative in the future, but it will pay me not to act too hastily which I consider the options. This is going to be an ongoing debate for some time and I anticipate that there will be other companies looking to move in to the space which is being vacated by Adobe. In the meantime, Lightroom Classic CC will still be there. For a while, at least.

So, if you are a committed Lightroom user, is it all doom and gloom? That very much depends on how you see the future. The move to Cloud based systems has been coming for a while, taking computing demands away from the desktop. It started with the introduction of the Internet and then smartphones and tablets, which act as a gateway to services provided remotely. For many years, the pundits have been predicting there will no longer be a need for a desktop computer and that day is beginning to arrive. As with any significant change, there will be resistance and bumps in the road. Many will not like the idea of the move away from paying once for software and then using it for as long as they wish without restriction.

Amazingly, the concept of cloud computing it is not actually a new idea. In the early days of computers, users had terminals which linked to a mainframe in a data centre. If you are old enough, you will remember green screen VDUs or even teletypes which were used to input and retrieve data. Certainly modern applications and technology are different and the Internet means that user devices are not restricted to a specific location, but many of the principles remain the same. Welcome to the future of the past.

For the optimist's view of Adobe's announcement, there is one more article on DPReview:

https://www.dpreview.com/opinion/609862 ... the-future

In my blog post, I mentioned that other companies will be introducing their Lightroom alternatives, taking advantage of the uncertainty Adobe has introduced. This article from DPReview highlights one of them.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/128879694 ... to-manager

Adobe is the 800lb gorilla of the image processing software world and is used by many professionals who will probably welcome the cloud computing initiative. It has a lot of advantages for them. I would not be surprised if that is the market Adobe mainly pursues, which means that Lightroom Classic CC could have a limited life. While it is too soon to know how Adobe's initiative will turn out, it is not too early to start considering other options.

Lightroom has two main functions. Image management, usually referred to as Digital Asset Management and image processing. It is convenient having them both in the same package, especially as Lightroom maintains a record of the Develop module settings. I would not necessarily be looking for one application as a potential replacement for Lightroom, provided that there is easy interaction between any applications I might select.