I have a question concerning Lightroom. Or rather a complaint? I'm not sure. So far I used Picasa to manage my images, it's fairly fast, works somewhat well with my approach of using windows explorer to transfer files from memory cards to computer and is rather easy to use.
Lightroom obviously offers more functionality which I would like. However, it seems incompatible with my way of doing things so far. (e.g.: Catalogs and having to import new folders manually instead of having watch folders that are automatically updated in LR). Also it does seem quite a bit slower than Picasa when starting the program itself or browsing through images. (Although to be fair, as of now I have all my 50.000+ pictures in one catalog and I might have saved the catalog file on an HDD instead of my SSD).
In summary I think I don't quite understand the concept of the Lightroom catalogs. And that frustrates me. I've read that you want multiple small catalogs for speed reasons, but I would like to be able to filter all my pictures for certain criteria now and then. That wouldn't work if I had different catalogs sorted by year or so, right?