In a post on the Adobe Lightroom Journal blog, Tom Hogarty, Senior Product Manager for photography products, apologized on Friday for the quality of Monday’s Lightroom 6.2 and CC 2015.2 releases. He acknowledges first that it was a mistake to ship the product before resolving the crash bug.

In terms of why they made the Import redesign choices they did, he indicated, “The import experience in Lightroom is daunting.  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.  We made decisions on sensible defaults and placed many of the controls behind a settings panel.  At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality.”

Tom then went on to acknowledge that “Lightroom was created in 2006 via a 14 month public beta in a dialog with the photography community.  In making these changes without a broader dialog I’ve failed the original core values of the product and the team.”

Adobe does collect usage statistics from users unless we opt out in Account settings on adobe.com, so there is data to back up his statements. Nevertheless, there are some features that have been removed that if rarely used, I would argue need to be made more prominent rather than removed, including Destination previews and the Eject after Import option for memory cards.  In addition, many of you have commented this week that  there must be a way to keep existing features so that your workflows aren’t broken, even if they are hidden by default so that new users aren’t confused by them.

In any case, overall I see Tom’s public apology as a positive first step, and I appreciate that he released it. I look forward to seeing how he and the Adobe team proceed from here to rebuild trust and confidence and to develop solutions that meet the needs of both new and experienced Lightroom users. Overall they have given us a great product, so I still have faith that they will get back on track.

You can read Tom’s full statement on the Lightroom Journal here.

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