Making books using lightroom

First off, let me say, I love lightroom. It’s been awesome so far and I’m on 4.2 RC. I then had a “bright idea” I never made a book within Lightroom and so I decided to go make albums of family vacations. Collections ready, I started on making books;

Here’s where CRAP HIT THE FAN !

Here’s the steps I took:

1) sorted photos into collections, each collection is a separate album

2) dragged photos into page templates and re-aranged pages etc etc

3) started the editing/tweaking photos…this means “jumping” between modules so far so good

4) two weeks later and onto 6th book…I noticed the edits were gone on some of photos in the 5th book. So I went and re-did the edits when done I went back to the 6th book.

5) completed arranging the pages on 6th book. Next session, I open up the 6th book and the photos are all over the place and as in not in the original order nor in the right template page. I had to clear the book and re-do the book…roughly 130 pages. went back to the 5th book for final check and low and behold…about 70% of the photos, lost all the edits.

6) finished all edits on 5th book and redid paging on 6th book. now all the photos are missing from the pages on the 4th book (but still in the filmstrip). All the text still shows and as far as I can tell, the pages and templates are correct and in order.

So now, I have exported all the books just in case and going to restore a back up to get the 4th book back I hope it works.

Surfing the net, it seems this issue is pretty common in all book module capable versions….so my lesson learnt is:

1) do all the edits to photos first

2) layout the book in one sitting and backup/export/upload immediately

This is really really frustrating ! If you ever make a book in lightroom (up to vrsion 4.2 rc), you’ve been warned…

Now I don’t think it was such a good idea to use lightroom to make a book even though it seemed so “seamless” (I print books via Blurb). I Should have just used blurb’s booksmart program from the start…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.