Saturday, December 27, 2008

Nice UI Feature

Here's a screen shot of part of the Adobe Lightroom Export dialog:

It consists of a bunch of sections that you can open and close. The part I like is that when they are closed they show a summary of the settings from that section. So you can leave sections closed but still see what you have chosen. Very nice. I haven't noticed this in any programs.

One minor criticism is that the "mode", in this case "Files on Disk" is chosen with the small, easily missed up/down arrow at the top right. I didn't figure this out for a while - I thought the only way to change it was to choose different presets (not shown in the screenshot)

The other thing I have trouble with when exporting is that I forget to select all the pictures. It does tell you at the top that it is only exporting one selected photo, but I always seem to miss this. But when it completes way faster than I expect, then I realize I forgot to select all the photos. Doh! It might be nice if the export dialog had a way to choose "All photos in collection" like the Slideshow module has.

Another nice part of Lightroom's export is that they have a facility for "plugins". I use Jeffrey Friedl's plugin for exporting to Google Picasa Web albums. There are also plugins for other things like Flickr.

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