I just installed this application on the advice of a photographer that I am working with (I am going to redesign his site). The brief whirlwind tour I took last night kind of blew me away. I really liked the way it organized photos, but my main purpose was to check out being able to output html and flash web pages for sharing portfolios online. They turned out fast, beautiful, and functional galleries.
The first thing I wanted to do, however, was to be able to customize it so that the output matched the overall design of a given site. Although some minor modifications can be made to the colors, and fonts, it would be nice if you could turn on/off the headers to that it could be easily be embedded within a page, with navigation, that I have designed. I will be looking for ways to noodle with the output now and in the future, and I hope that the commercial release, whenever it comes, includes more functionality in this area.
You can download the beta version of Lightroom here, and it is worth trying out just to see how it works. I’m going to start with this article by John Nack and hopefully it won’t be to difficult to follow. It’s just the thing that might get me to actually learn Flash, instead of just think about it.