• Tool Shop Tools

Last year Apple stopped development of Aperture, their high-end photo management program, which I used to manage my photographs for many years. Thus I was forced to switch to a new tool, and went for Adobe Lightroom, which is pretty much the standard choice for serious photographers (and those like me with pretentions to seriousness).

Squeak squeak, otherbuckets. You find yourself in the sewers, where a young dude with really weird-looking abs is beating up some rats. Spoiled Tool Shop Staff Client Tool Shop Staff The Tool Shop clerk seems to be having trouble. Listen to her.

On the whole I like Lightroom and despite my lesser familiarity, I think I prefer it to Aperture. But, of course, there are things missing. One major omission for me is the inability to query for a repeating annual date range. If you follow my atom feed, you'll know that I regularly pump out photos to the feed. Initially I just put out a photo I fancied sharing onto the feed, but after the first few photos I decided on something a little more structured.

Tool Shop Tools

A photo that appears on my feed now needs to be shot at about the same time of year as when I post it, and be at least a year old. That way the photo reflects the season we're currently in (at least here in the Northern Hemisphere) and is old enough for me to be reasonably confident in my liking for the photo. Aperture allowed me to do this easily, as I could select the month number as part of a query for a smart collection - so for a November picture I could query for photos with a month number of '11'. While Lightroom has a powerful smart collections feature too, it lacks this ability. I can query for a date range, but that date range is anchored.