JDI Proposal

[Chris Kern]

I've just spent several hours tidying up my Lightroom catalog and, along the way, I found a few orphaned files LR can't manage.

Admittedly, these aren't particularly desirable formats for images: PDFs, GIFs and animated GIFs.  But I'm stuck with them because these are the legacy encoding formats (I think of them as the raw files of the Jurassic era of digitization) for some cruft that has been hanging around for years in my filesystems: any conversion I might perform now would involve possible information loss.

I'm not arguing for a feature-rich capability.  A primitive display function, similar to the way LR 5 handles video formats, would be fine—at least for my modest purposes.  My goal is simply to have all my damn image assets managed by the same DAM software.

I was an early subscriber to the Adobe Creative Cloud and it seems to me this idea might qualify for one of those "just do it" requests.  I understand that there may be some lingering intellectual-property issues involving GIFs (does anybody still take those seriously these days?), but I believe they, however demented, refer only to encoding, not decoding.  And certainly PDFs shouldn't be a problem for Adobe.

[Schewe]

Sorry, don't hold your breath...

[wolfnowl]

I have no pull with Adobe to my knowledge, but this would seem to supercede the idea of LR as being built for photographers.  Granted they included .png files with LR5, but to the best of my knowledge no camera works with .gif or .pdf files.  Bridge is a glorified file browser; you could look their instead! 

Mike.

[john beardsworth]

I very much agree with you, Chris. If it's built for photographers, photographers should be able to define which file types are part of their workflows.

However, I also agree with Jeff. I've put the need to Adobe many times, and I've seen no sign of any inclination to move from the line that file types must be camera-generated. The application of that policy may have shifted in the past, when photographers started shooting video, and it is inconsistent now that PNGs are also allowed, but Adobe's heels are well dug in. Second, while this improvement is largely about removing restrictions, not adding features, it's much more than a JDI. As a minimum you'd want to display the operating system thumbnails of other files, and you've got to move the restrictions on file types and prevent users putting Word or PDF invoices through Develop, for example.

The nearest you can get is a plugin called AnyFile. I don't know how well it works.

John

[jjj]

I've been asking this for many years and years because as John says, photographers should be able to define what files are part of their workflow.
There is not necessarily any need for LR to open/view/develop such files other than maybe a thumbnail. No different from handling a PSD. LR cannot open it but can happily pass it on to PS for content viewing/editing.
Not allowing a digital asset manager [which is what LR's Library is] to manage one's digital assets is a bit bonkers. It's an arbitrary decision made even more frustrating by the fact that even pro photographers are using many types of files such as video or graphics in their business. And having to mix and match file organisation programmes impedes the workflow that LR is meant to make smoother.

The grudging recent acceptance of video or PNGs only shows how daft the arbitrary limitations are, but suggest any change in forums and you'll be savaged by a pack of photographers saying "keep LR pure. Don't accept video or other files, LR is for photographers, burn the video shooters…" and so on.
I find this outright hostility very strange. If you don't want non-image files in LR, then simply do not import them. It's not a tricky concept. 

LR's half hearted video support looks even dafter now that you can process video in PS with ACR - which is the LR Develop module with a crappier layout.
Mind you add ACR/LR Dev to Premiere Pro and that'll make a lot of people very happy. Though I've also suggested a variation of LR [GradingRoom] that was aimed at video would be an amazing tool for complementing an editing programme like Premiere. Like Speedgrade, but good.