I know I’m kind of late with this, as it’s news that was doing the rounds last week, but it looks like Lightroom 6 will be shipping soon. The rumour is based on a premature posting on the french Store Fnac's website (It’s since been removed) According to the listing Lightroom 6 will ship on March 9th ( Just a few weeks from now)

The site lists some of the upgrade’s new features in French, and a complete translation can be found on PhotoRumors.

There are a couple of things of interest that caught my attention. The first is that if this is true, it means that Adobe still plan to sell a boxed version of Lightroom. There had been some concerns, with Adobe’s recent moves to a subscription only model, that the company would do the same with the next version of Lightroom, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen with version 6 anyway.

Another interesting thing is the possible mention of GPU acceleration in the list of features. Performance issues have been a bone of contention for some Lightroom users, especially those switching from Aperture. Other rumours had mentioned that Adobe were focussing on performance improvements with this release, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Some other interesting additions are the ability to create Panoramas and HDR images directly within the software. This has also been regularly requested, and will mean some more reasons not to have to go to Photoshop.

There’s also some features listed that should be familiar to former Aperture users, and that’s face recognition (I never used this myself) and video slideshows. Adobe had promised to cater for Aperture switchers, although I’m not sure you could say these are features directly targeted at Aperture users, they were some of the only major features missing (And before you send emails, I’m talking about major features, not workflow, or ui design or performance, or anything else) from Lightroom that Aperture had.

These are probably only headline features anyway, as there wasn’t a full list, and many of those noted in the product listing are existing features anyway. Personally, I hope performance is the major focus, but I would also like to see improvements to metadata handling and the library side of things in general, as I personally find these could be improved. I guess we’ll know in the next few weeks.

[UPDATE] At the time of this update, there's still no sign of Lightroom 6. A subsequent leak from an Australian retailer put the release date at March 25th but that's come and gone too. Best Buy also momentarily listed the software for sale, so while it's likely that it is still coming soon, either there was a last minute delay, or a lot of stores got a bit ahead of themselves.

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