Think of your images as books in a library. Each book is on a shelf somewhere (folders of your hard drive). The books and shelves may be organized in some fashion that may or may not make it easy to locate an individual book.

The catalog is the little cabinet in the front of the library that is full of cards describing each book – who is the author, where is it located in the library, what keywords it has, and so forth. When you look at a card in the catalog, you see a thumbnail of the image, and have a pointer to exactly where in the library that image is located.

A collection is a list of some of the cards in the catalog that meet certain criteria. In a regular collection, you pick and choose which cards to include in a new list (for example, my favorite images). In a smart collection, you pick the criteria to match, and the computer does the work of searching through the catalog for cards that match (all images with keyword "vacation" that were taken in 2011). With Smart Collections, the list is generated automatically.

Catalogs and collections do NOT contain images. They contain the cards that tell about the image – its location, information about the image, even a thumbnail of what the image looks like.

This is why moving images around outside of Lightroom is bad. You move the image on you hard drive, and the catalog of cards is still indicating that the image is located where it used to be. Try to find it there, and you get a big question mark.

When you move an image within Lightroom, the catalog of cards is updated with the new location if the image. And, since catalogs are just groups of copies of the cards, they are all updated too.

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I’ve put together a brief video to demonstrate the process of adding albums for Facebook. I’ve heard rumblings that this process may not work on Macs due to some problem within Lightroom; if you can confirm this I’d like to hear about it (drop me a comment below).

Lightroom 3 – Adding Facebook Albums

• Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Release Candidate
• Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 5.7 Release Candidate
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.7 Release Candidate
• And, of course, the recently announced Adobe Ideas 1.0 for iPad

All that, on top of the already available applications in Beta:

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 beta 2
• Adobe Flash Catalyst beta 2
• Adobe AIR 2 beta 2

All told, the development teams at Adobe have given us a boatload of new stuff to play with. And with the CS5 announcement just days away, stand by for much more to come! Way to go, Adobe!!

At first glance, it appears Adobe has made some nice changes on both the importing and exporting side of the program. While some of us have learned to “do things the Lightroom way” when it comes to managing the import process, these changes are sure to help the people who struggle with Lightroom’s methods of copying, storing and organizing files on your hard drive. On the export side, look for a host of improvements for getting your images posted on the web, including an interface for Flickr (although there is some innuendo that developers for other services will be able to create connections to other popular sites as well, perhaps available as a plug-in).

Also on the output side, the ability to add watermarks is beefed up considerably, with support for opacity, something that was sorely lacking in previous versions. And, for those interested in creating multimedia presentations, you can now embed music in your slideshows.

There are too many new features to list here, so I’ll just send you over to The Lightroom Journal where you can read much more directly from Tom Hogarty himself. Also, head over to the NAPP website for the updated Lightroom Learning Center.

That’s it for now, I’m diving back in!!