Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Pc/Mac Beta active till April 2010

"Thank you for your interest in downloading the Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 3 beta. Lightroom 3 builds on the vision of the very first Lightroom beta. From day 1, Lightroom was designed for photographers and by photographers to help them focus on what they love—the art and craft of photography. Lightroom provides photographers with an elegant and efficient way to work with their growing digital image collections, bring out the best in their images, and make an impact from raw capture to creative output, all while maintaining the highest possible quality each step of the way.

Learn more about the Lightroom 3 beta
Terms of Use
Your use of Adobe Labs, including the downloading of software and submission of comments, ideas, feature requests, and techniques, and Adobe's rights to use such submitted materials are governed by the Adobe.com Terms of Use and the Adobe Online Privacy Policy. By downloading, copying, or using Adobe software and related materials, you also agree to the appropriate Adobe Software License Agreement, including the limitations related to prerelease software.

Beta Timeframe
When you install the public beta of Lightroom 3, the software will remain active through April 2010. Once the commercial version of Lightroom 3 has shipped, you will need to uninstall the beta and install the final version.

Lightroom Beta Installers

This download will install the Lightroom 3 beta and will work independently alongside your installation of Lightroom 1 or higher. The beta version is intended to provide an opportunity to give feedback and as such, does not read, upgrade or import catalogs from previous versions of Lightroom. If you currently own Lightroom, please continue to use Lightroom 1 or higher for your primary workflow needs.""

Looks a good program but not too sure about the small print ,

"*This product may allow you to access certain features that are hosted online (“online services”), provided you have a high-speed Internet connection. The online services, and some features thereof, may not be available in all countries, languages, and/or currencies and may be discontinued in whole or in part without notice. Use of the online services is governed by separate terms of use and by the Adobe Online Privacy Policy, and access to these services may require user registration. Some online services, including services that are initially offered at no charge, may be subject to additional fees."

Well its only a Beta - I suggest that this "generic" small print clause is more directed at their full price products.

it just means you can upload directly to flickr from the program

I use the current version of Lightroom and can't fault it. Great way to sort and edit your digital photos.

For flickr I'd recommend their uploader software where you just drag and drop files into a folder on your desktop and the rest pretty much sorts itself - http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploadr/

I'm a big fan of Lightroom 2.0, haven't tried this beta yet. Give it a go, it's seriously good powerful stuff. Hopefully they've fixed the lagging library with this version.

I can only second the prise for Lightroom, it's saved me hours of effort.

For Flickr I use Jeffrey Friedl's amazing plug in:
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr

I believe it's only got rudimentary support for Lightroom 3 beta at the moment, but works a charm in Lightroom 2.

Also from Jeffrey's blog:

"The beta release is not intended for real, heavy, day-to-day work.

"This is “beta” in the pre-Google sense, where it really means that things are rough, lots of things aren't as smooth as they could be, and some things don't work at all. For example, the image-render pipeline has gotten a bunch of new stuff, but the focus for the beta is on image quality, and it has not yet been optimized for speed, so in important ways LR3B can be slower than LR2. It's been known to freeze while importing from some devices, and to crash at random times."

So be warned