New Plugin Releases and Support for Lightroom 2

We have been writing plugins for Lightroom for some time now.  Our first plugin was the Export Backup plugin published back in January 2009 and since then Adobe has kept rolling out new releases of Lightroom to keep us interested.

With the release of Lightroom 5 earlier this year we now needed to support our plugins on 4 releases of Lightroom. Or more accurately 8 releases, as the Mac and Windows versions of Lightroom behave slightly differently so we needed to test on both operating systems to ensure correct plugin behaviour. As you can imagine testing each plugin release 8 times eats into the available time to make improvements to the code.

We have decided to cease testing support for Lightroom 2 in all future releases of our plugins. This will allow us to focus on delivering new features to the Lightroom versions in active use today.  What exactly does this mean?

You will notice that we aren’t actually preventing users from trying newer plugin releases in Lightroom 2, and we won’t intentionally do anything to break Lightroom 2 support, but there are no guarantees it will work either.

Does this impact support of Lightroom 2 by our older plugin versions? Not at all. They will continue to work, and if you ever need to download these older plugin versions again please refer to the plugin’s FAQ page. There we will retain a direct link to the last supported plugin version for each Lightroom release.

In the IT industry it is common to adopt an “n minus 1” support policy, meaning that only the current and immediately prior releases of software are supported. At this stage we have yet to clarify how many of our current plugin users are still on Lightroom 3 and would miss out on new features under such a policy. We will be looking into this further and once we have better information about our user base’s demographics we may need to revise this policy further.

Thanks for your continued interest and support over the years, and we are hoping this change to our testing regime will allow us to deliver new plugin features and versions to you more frequently.


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Posted on September 15, 2013 at 3:29 pm by Matt · Permalink
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