I might have missed the obvious but can you use LR to manage the rest of your imagecollection?

I have a lot of JPGs from digital compacts and it would be nice to be able to keyword these images to be able to search and select from that collection as well.

I understand if image editing needs to be performed in photoshop since the editing in lightroom is based around raw-images but can you use any of the image control tools in LR on JPG?

LR's non-destructive-editing and keywording...etc work equally well with JPG, DNG, PSD, RAW, TIFF: simply have a look at the Datasheet
...and/or try it for 30 days for free and shall see: it's a big fun!

P.S.: as an after-thought, just to avoid any confusion or misunderstanding, the quality and/or convenience advantages of any of the above formats vs any of the other ones is not influenced by the use of LR. I mean e.g. quality and flexibility of using RAW vs JPG for your photography still keep valid.
The bottom line advantage of LR is NON-destructive-edit and ONE interface for image-processing and keyword(IPTC,etc)-managing ALL the above mentioned formats.

Great! That was exactly what I wanted to know. I shoot RAW+JPG with my D70 but from what I have heard about LR I might not need to shoot JPGs for quick viewing.

The problem is that I have used a few digital compacts that only have the ability to shoot JPG and it would be great to have those in the same library as my DSLR pics (and older scans as well)

New question:
Does anybody know if LR can handle raw files form vuescan by the way?

/Jonas

I didn't know what Vuescan is, I have done an internet search and got this:

Best raw file software: Adobe LightRoom - reads VueScan's Raw DNG files (Apple's Aperture doesn't)
from here (see bottom).
Don't know if this is the "vuescan" you are interested in.

Yes that's the one. Seems I'm just lazy. Thanks for finding it.

It's one of the best scanning software available. It supports almost every scanner on the markat as well as almost everything in the past.

/Jonas

I'm not 100% sure whether this is an error on my behalf or whether it's something to do with Lightroom but the following might be something to keep in the back of your mind should this happen to you.
At the moment I have only been using Lightroom for testing purposes before letting the beast loose on all my images and therefore have only imported ten or so images - I also shoot RAW+jpg. What I have found is that when I import these images only the RAW's are imported and couldn't figure out why. However, somewhere in the back of my mind I seem to remember that Lightroom only imports one copy of files with the SAME filename - the fact that one is suffixed CR and the other jpg is immaterial to Lightroom, they begin with the same file numbers. I have found that by renaming my jpegs first and then importing both RAWs and jpegs are imported. Seems a strange thing to have to do and if I am correct in the above, and more importantly, there is a shorter work round I would appreciate someone please telling me. I guess the long term answer is to only shoot in RAW??

Yes, what you say seems to be true- I have not tried it yet but in another thread here, Sean McCormack confirms the behaviour you described:

So, until Adobe hone this behaviour to be really distiguishing actual sidecar files from other kind with same name, I don't see any better workaround than renaming.

You can always put them in a subfolder, import that, then move them back into the correct folder. The control works upon import, not once they are already in the library.

The idea was, like Aperture, that the jpeg shadows would be managed without the user ever needing to see them. So you can rename the raw, and the matching jpeg is renamed, delete or move the raw etc. Some users want it this way - if I shot raw+jpeg I know I would - but others need it differently for equally good reasons. The same problem affects tifs and psds in the same folder as the raw files. I'd bet on this changing before long.

John

Thanks John (and others) for the info on this issue. I keep all my variations of a file with the same basic file name and folder as a rough and ready way of dealing with the versioning issue. I want to import all of them into LR then stack them. I guess I now stop looking for my importing error and use one or other of the "work arounds" .

Terry

if I shoot RAW+JPG I would like to see them both and rename them all at once
name1.NEF name1.JPG
so Lightroom renames JPGs and RAWs at once?

I could import them in a temp folder delete the bad images rename the good ones
remove them from the catalog and reimport the JPGS and RAWs separately.
would this work?
stefano

Yes, test it.

Just to reiterate the answer to the original question, Lightroom does a great job with JPEG. I shoot 95% JPEG and have been using Lightroom for a couple of weeks now and I don't see a huge difference in what I can do with JPEG vs. RAW files. I suspect the RAW files have greater lattitude to some of the changes and will respond a little differently, but in general all the functions are there with JPEG too. One thing I've noticed in 1.0 is that the "Auto" function seems to badly blow out everything with JPEGs where it does a nice job with RAW. I am suspecting that this is probably a bug.

LR does fine with jpg's and other formats, though it doesn't read .bmp, .trg or some other weird ones.

It is true that LR will only import one file of a specific filename. It seems to take .psd's first, then .dng, then .nef, then .jpg. As soon as it finds one, it ignores the rest. Unfortunately, it does this silently, not informing or warning you that some images haven't been imported.

Why are you shooting raw+jpg, anyway? With a product like LR, I don't see a reason for it. It just takes more space and clutters up the folders. The raw files display just as quickly and are just as usable.