Adobe updates Lightroom CC

Adobe has updated Lightroom CC 2015 to CC 2015.2, or is it a downgrade? Most people will agree that the new possibility to add ‘Dehaze’ locally (with the Adjustment Brush, Graduated Filter or Radial Filter) is great, but it seems that many experienced users are less happy with the changes to the Import dialog. That dialog is now split into two. First you get a general ‘Add Photos’ screen, that asks you whether you want to import from disk or memory card, and shows some scanned folders. I advise you to switch off this screen in “Preferences – General – Show ‘Add Photos’ Screen”, because it’s a pretty useless extra step. The next dialog is the one that gets many Lightroom users upset, and rightfully so. It’s a ‘dumbed down’ version of the previous import dialog, and quite a few useful options have completely disappeared. Gone is the option to show the folder structure that is going to be created if you use dated folders. Gone is the preview of the file name change. You can only ‘Add’ images or ‘Copy’ images now, it’s no longer possible to ‘Move’ images while importing them. And you cannot automatically eject the memory card after import either.

All these changes are supposed to make Lightroom easier to understand for novice users, but I doubt it will do that. The biggest problem that novice users have is understanding the concept of ‘importing’ images into Lightroom. They think their images are ‘in Lightroom’ after importing. What they don’t understand is that you can import goods into the country by bringing those goods across the border and storing them in a warehouse in Honolulu, even if the office database that keeps records of it (your Lightroom database) is located in Miami. The new import dialog does nothing to change that misconception.

Even though I haven’t found any problems myself (many people also report crashes at import) and even though I can personally live with the omissions from the import dialog, I think this is a bad move of Adobe. I’m not sure if I can advise anyone to update right now.

UPDATE: in the meantime Adobe launched a CC 2015.2.1 update, but it seems this update does not address (all) the problems. There are even reports that things are getting worse after this update. Don’t update just yet!