Running Vista, I have installed the Canon provided RAW codec for CR2 format.  It allows you view those files natively. 

I was browsing through a folder of pictures.  I noticed that it got slower and slower as I went through the pages.  Eventually, it gave me an out of memory error.  I didn't have anything else open.  I brought up Task Manager and saw that I had memory left.  I closed the picture viewer and just watched the memory get reclaimed in about 20 seconds.  The total delta there is about 1.5 gig.

I tried to import pictures for the first time in Lightroom on my new Vista machine.

I kept on getting the mysterious:

"Problem with Importing Files - the file was not imported. Could not copy a file to the requested location."

At first I thought it was my card reader.  I got a brand new, built in one.  But I was able to read the files directly.  So I tried copying the files to my desktop and importing them from there.  I got the same error.

I double checked the file permissions of the target and they were all fine.  I also tried not applying any Metadata templates or "Rendering Standard-Sized Previews."   Same result.

Normally, I organize the imported pictures with the following options:

I went ahead and changed to:

surprisingly that worked! However, that is frustrating because I like to auto create a separate folder for each day based upon date taken.

After looking around on Adobe's website, I found the following:

http://www.adobe.com/go/kb401508

If the By Date path you select for your folder in the Import Photos dialog box contains a forward slash, then your photos are not imported.

So it is a Lightroom bug with Vista.  I changed the option to:

That will work fine.  I can then rearrange after import.  I really want an option that makes it YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD/.  For now, I will manually create that structure. 

One thing that is weird:  this is one of the few "template" things that you cannot edit in the application settings folder for Lightroom.

DAM as in Digital Asset Management.  One of my hobbies that I have had great interest in since high school has been photography.  I have always enjoyed the whole experience:  taking pictures, developing, printing and sharing.  In fact, I really wanted to create my own darkroom in my house just before digital photography became available.

I have been evaluating the following products for quite some time:

• Google's Picasa2
• Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006
• iMatch Image Management
• iView Media Pro3 (Microsoft Elements)

Others that I have researched but did not try were the following:

• Adobe LightRoom (beta)
• Adobe Photoshop Elements

It is truly amazing how some of the products do a few things very nice but fall short in some other aspect that makes it very frustrating. 

Some of the key things that I looked at were:

• Ease of use
• UI--Is it clunky?  It is elegant and simple?  Is is overwhelming?
• Speed--Do I need water cooling or a 486?
• Extensibility--Can you script?  Does it support plugins? 
• How well does it play with others?--Does it use standard IPTC or EXIF?  Does have a proprietary format or backend database?  Where does it store its data?
• Tagging and Organization:  Does it support hierarchical tagging?  What about GEO Tagging? 
• Offline Capabilities
• Unwanted upselling?  Does "encourage" you to use their vendor for printing or web hosting of the pictures?
• Does it support RAW?
• Workflow:  Does it support multiuser?  how do you import the pictures?
• Cost

Some of the things that were really low on my list were:

• Photo editing
• CD/DVD editing
• Picture sharing

I will starting posting a writeup on these.