What a wild and crazy Lightroom week it’s been.
After the fiasco last week with the premature release of the latest update of Lightroom causing crashes, the subsequent apology and a super fast update to fix the crash issue, I’d have to say to my students and readers, hold off on updating to 6.2! After 690 complaints in just a few days, Tom Hogarty of Adobe’s Lightroom Team announced that they will now revert back to the old import dialog! There are other issues also with 6.2, most importantly, reports of import stalls. Lightroom 6.3 is coming, but we don’t know when. With that said, if you’ve already installed 6.2 and need to return to version 6.1 here’s what to do.
Adobe put up a step-by-step page! Here’s the link:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/roll-back-to-prior-update.html
Step 1 : Mac: Uninstall LR (Applications>Adobe Lightroom>Uninstall Adobe Lightroom, PC: Go to the Add/Remove Programs window
Step 2 : Go to Download and Install the 2015.0/6.0 release
Step 3: Chose the Adobe Lightroom 6 panel
Step 4 : Select the Mac or PC version 2015.1.1/6.1.1
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The biggest mistake Adobe has made in years has been the Import Dialog rework, which Adobe was calling “the new Lightroom import experience.” Just a look at the Lightroom comments on the Lightroom 6.2 New Features Summary with 690 complaints as of this writing and you can see huge pushback and other issues that were occuring.
And let’s face it, nearly everyone at some point with Lightroom has had some kind of problem importing. So this was supposed to make importing a “unified experience.” Whatever that means. If I had to make a Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of it, I’d have to say it means to bring together the process of doing things. Well, that doesn’t help. And neither did the new import dialog.
I find it very curious that in the Lightroom 6.2 New Features Summary, the drawing below was used to illustrate how the new import works. It would have been much easier to comprehend this than the actual 6.2 import dialog they designed which you can see below the illustration in the before and after “improvement.”
The diagram used to Illustrate how the new import dialog works
To me, the illustration would have been a much better choice for a “simplified” import dialog. Sure, the new version was pretty, but wait! Whose photo is that in the background??? That’s not mine! What’s it doing there??? I can’t change it to a neutral gray, or one of my photos? Geez.
Okay, then. What else? The “Eject After Import” feature was gone. To quote the first apology letter “we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity.”I don’t know anyone who didn’t use it. The question yesterday was, would “they” put it back? Would they bring back the old import interface? Hmmm. There seemed to be an indication that Adobe was shooting for the iPhoto crowd, but they heard us and they’re going to return the old import and hopefully fix some of the other issues BEFORE releasing 6.3.
So hold off on updating just a little longer so Adobe can find some solutions and release the next iteration. To quote Tom Hogarty, “We will continue to investigate ways to improve the ease of use of our photography products and will do so via an open dialog, with both existing and new customers.”
Tune in for the next exciting episode of “Lightroom Updates Big Fail.”
Sigh. Let’s forge ahead.