Tom Hogarty and the Lightroom Management Team The team will continue to work hard to earn your trust back in subsequent releases and I look forward to reigniting the type of dialog we started in 2006. In making these changes without a broader dialog I’ve failed the original core values of the product and the team. Lightroom was created in 2006 via a 14 month public beta in a dialog with the photography community.
These changes were not communicated properly or openly before launch. At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality. We made decisions on sensible defaults and placed many of the controls behind a settings panel. It’s a step that every customer must successfully take in order to use the product and overwhelming customers with every option in a single screen was not a tenable path forward. Our customers, educators and research team have been clear on this topic: The import experience in Lightroom is daunting.
The simplification of the import experience was also handled poorly.
The bug has been fixed and today’s update addresses the stability of Lightroom 6. The scope of that bug was unclear and we made the incorrect decision to ship with the bug while we continued to search for a reproducible case (Reproducible cases are essential for allowing an engineer to solve a problem). In our efforts to simplify the import experience we introduced instability that resulted in a significant crashing bug. The team cares passionately about our product and our customers and we failed on multiple fronts with this release. I’d like to personally apologize for the quality of the Lightroom 6.2 release we shipped on Monday. In fact, there were so many problems, Adobe very quickly issued Lightroom 6.2.1 to fix the crashing and bug issues, along with a public apology issued by Tom Hogarty. It was fraught with issues of crashing and bugs and many users and educators were shocked to see a total overhaul of the Import dialog’s user interface (UI). Quite recently, Adobe gave us all Lightroom 6.2, which was an update that was, well, a not so welcome one. Lightroom’s new (and temporary) Import dialog released with version Lightroom 6.2