This post is about trimming down the file size of an Adobe Lightroom catalog. In keeping with the off-season them of my previous post (which was filled with fall-foliage photos), this post is sprinkled with a few photos from Kyoto springs past, chosen more for their mentally-calming effect than for photographic quality, which they generally lack. (Sorry)

In a nutshell, if you have a large Lightroom catalog, and if you don't need the detailed editing history for your photos, you might be able to significantly reduce the size of your Lightroom catalog by flushing that edit-history data, which might generally [...]

Today is the 25th anniversary of my first arrival in Japan. 来日２５周年になりました！

It was June 19th, 1989 that I flew into Tokyo from California after having finished grad school and then lived with my brothers for several months while waiting for my work visa to be approved. I was met at the airport by Krish Kulkarni, whom I had never met, but had no trouble finding because he's the twin brother of my best friend at grad school, Ram Kulkarni (who later went on to be the best man at my wedding, and I at his).

A day or [...]

Photos in yesterday's "Heian Shrine Gate From a New Perspective" were taken during an open house at a new wedding-venue business. The fifth-floor terrace from where I took those photos is off a small cafe where wedding guests can wait for the events to begin.

The cafe was richly lit with shade streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up two walls, but it was much darker than the outside, so the wide dynamic range (wide range between shadows and brights) made for a fun challenge.

To create the photo above, I overexposed for the outside and then "slightly" [...]

Today Adobe released a release candidate for Lightroom 5.3, which I believe fixes the nasty Lr5 Publish/Selection bug I've written about. If you give 5.3RC a try, let me know whether it seems to be fixed for you as well...

I have an update on the nasty publish/selection bug that been plaguing some Lightroom users of late, in the selection shown in the grid is sometimes wrong.

It seems that the bug exists only when Lightroom is started with a section in the Publish Segmented Grid ("Modified Photos to Re-Publish", etc.) is closed. So, if you ensure that all segments are open, then restart Lightroom and maintain them open, your grid-selection experience should be bug free.

The opened/closed state of each grid section is globally shared among all collections, so opening all four possible sections (New, Modified, Deleted, and Published) [...]