Adobe Lightroom 4 Beta is out!

I’m looking forward to this. I’ve been a user of Lightroom since it first came out as version one, and it’s been indispensible for managing my growing photo collection (I passed the 10000 mark last year).

I’m particularly excited by the long-awaited introduction of proper geocoding support. I bought a GPS logger a year or two ago, and use Dirk Stichling’s My Tracks to add geotag my photos prior to importing them into Lightroom. When I export from Lightroom to iPhoto, the geotags are picked up and displayed nicely in the Places section of iPhoto (and on the iPhone and iPad). However, this only works when importing photos – existing photos cannot be geotagged. Jeffrey Friedl has written a plugin for Lightroom that achieves this, after a fashion, but I prefer my metadata to reside within embedded metadata, rather than in shadow files which are then written on export; and although My Tracks is a good application, I would prefer to have fewer steps in the overall process.

Of course, the ideal would be for Canon to release an accessory that geotags photos when they are taken, but for the moment, they seem to be preferring to take the third-party route.