Well, not all users are you. There is a very good reason for History, Lightroom tracks it whether or not you make it visible to see. If you don't like History, you are welcome to hit that little arrow to hide it.
Correct.
For some users such as scientific and industrial users, having an EXACT list of EVERY step is useful for proving the provinance of an image and how the user arrived at the final result.
Whoa. LR isn't quite the platform for Scientifically oriented users to begin with ...
I should know, having been in both that position (as a local sales and trade representative for Kodak's line of Instrumentation, Photofabrication, Aerial, and Scientific line of products) since some 38 years ago, AND being a certified Professional photographer for approximately 40 years by now (and an amateur photographer for some 48 years ...).
It seems to me that rather than trashing the history of your image's settings, you might simple want to not actively use the feature.
I agree.
If you want to know WHY History is in LR, it's there because LR tracks and stores everything it knows about an image and the adjustments made. It has to.
Not really, it doesn't have to, it only has to remember the relevant steps taken, it doesn't
NEED to record/display all of them (it could e.g. eliminate on/off, or before/after, attempts), and I therefore agree with Tim, it's also recording the (trial and error, and resetting) steps that are not essential to arriving at the final image. And even then, isn't the final attempt supposed to be the final attempt?
Snapshots can be used for alternative renderings, and they are better suited for the purpose of comparison, because they probably represent larger and more significant, stages of development.
Back when Mark Hamburg created LR, there was discussion about exposing the History to the users. There were some users (like me) that found History interesting and useful so Mark Exposed it to the user. If you don't like it, hide it...
Good advice, although it does occupy/waste space for those who do not need a track-record of
all of their (
temporary) trial settings.
People like Tim would like to, or
should try to, like in Photoshop, backtrack to several
intermediate attempts before progressing (AKA snapshots). I think that snapshots are the proper/better way to go about that, but wasted 'space' for on/off switches should not be recorded in history to begin with.
To mention but one of the improvements that could be implemented in LR
Cheers,
Bart