Even as an absolute amateur photographer it is a common problem organizing photos, modifying them, converting them from RAW to other formats, arranging them in categories and tagging them with keywords.

With normally more than 1000 photos it is very uncomfortable to do that without an appropriate program.
Even more problematic is that you need at least two programs: one for modifying and converting (as f.e. Adobe Photoshop) and one for organizing, tagging etc.

My camera was bundled with a software from Canon which I used for some time. But in depth it could not convince me. Slow, sometimes buggy… not appropriet for a working tool.

For modifying and converting I still use Photoshop but for the second tool I was looking for alternative. I wanted to have a look on Apples Aperture but as I read some articles on it and I think it is too hungry for hardware ressources. I cannot imagine how slow it may perform on my PowerBook G4 1.67. And even if it would work it is still expensive.

So I was interested when I read about Adobe tries to develop an competitor for Aperture. At the moment it is called Lightroom an it is available as a “beta testing download”:http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/. I just downloaded it and gave it a try and well it doesn’t look so bad.

I hope that in near future Adobe will bundle Lightroom with the Creative Suite.