Elements vs Lightroom Catalog

[john_es]

I am not sure if this is the place for this post... but I am trying out Lightroom and Elements and am a bit stuck. I wanted to go with LR, but LR won't add my videos to my catalog. Most of the time my videos correspond to the pictures so it's nice to have them all at once -- note that I do not wish to edit the videos at all. I suppose I could use elements for just video and LR for photos but that seems klunky. I am not sure if I could export/import the catalogs between the two programs say once a day, but I am guessing this is not possible. How have others handled this dilemma? Thanks, John

[MazG]

I am not sure if this is the place for this post... but I am trying out Lightroom and Elements and am a bit stuck. I wanted to go with LR, but LR won't add my videos to my catalog. Most of the time my videos correspond to the pictures so it's nice to have them all at once -- note that I do not wish to edit the videos at all. I suppose I could use elements for just video and LR for photos but that seems klunky. I am not sure if I could export/import the catalogs between the two programs say once a day, but I am guessing this is not possible. How have others handled this dilemma? Thanks, John

Hi John
I'm not sure how other people have handled it. Lightroom is the only cataloging program by Adobe that only addresses photos (it is purely designed for photographers not videographers). On the other hand, Organizer and Bridge (free with Elements Mac or Photoshop CS3) will both show you other kinds of files including video.

As far as I know the catalogs are not compatible. The only way you could synch them together (so to speak) is to use one program (I suggest Lightroom) to import the photos and tag them, then import them into Organizer (or make the folder a watched folder - then they'll import automatically). This is what I used to do when I used Lightroom but I have since simplified my workflow by ditching Lightroom.

Note: The reason for starting in Lightroom is that if you tag in Organizer you have to write the tags to file before importing to Lightroom (which introduces an extra step).

[Codebreaker]

Lightroom is more than just a Image Library Management program. It's real strength is in the power of it's RAW processing capability.

I think you should be asking yourself - what processing capability I need? If you can manage to do all this comfortably in Elements then you don't need LR. If you like the power that LR has - which is far greater than Elements - then you'll need both if you want to manage your vidoes somewhere.

Colin