• import photos from camera
• organizing photos
• assign flags and ratings
• adding titles and captions
• processing
• export to web gallery

Well, basically I use it for everything, except occasionally for some photos that I will use Photoshop to process and apply sharpening using Unsharp Mask. The introduction of Lightroom has streamlined my Raw digital workflow tremendously. The only problem is, I would like to have the photos exported to iPhoto too. You might ask – Why would I do that? Well, the iPhoto is good in a few areas:

1. the latest iPhoto ’09 has 2 great new features: Places and Faces. Even though my camera did not have GPS recording capability, I still can assign a location to the photos manually. ‘Faces’ feature detects human faces automatically in photos, and provides tagging. It has auto recognization capability, and it is compatible with Facebook’s face tagging too.
   

   iPhoto '09: 'Faces' feature

   iPhoto '09: 'Places' integrates with Google map

2. Ability to publish photos to Facebook, Flickr and MobileMe – I don’t use Flickr and MobileMe (for now), but I have Facebook.
3. Tight integration with Mac OS X, where many other applications can import/use photos from iPhoto, but not from Lightroom.

I know that Aperture is a great alternative for Lightroom, and provides native integration with Mac OS X applications, but I’ve tried it and don’t like it – probably not because of the software itself, but my familiarity to Lightroom, which I have started using since the initial release.

It turns out that exporting photos from Lightroom to iPhoto is really easy:

1. select the photos that you want to export under the Library tab of Lightroom
2. Go to File -> Export…
3. Under the Export Location, select a folder where the exported files will be temporarily stored. I put them in a folder called “Lightroom Export” on my Desktop, so that I can move them to Trash easily after I am done importing them into iPhoto.
4. Set other options as you wish
5. Under Post-Processing section, select “Open in Other Application” under the “After Export” drop down, and choose iPhoto in the Application folder. Then click “Export”.

This will import the selected photos into iPhoto, all put under “Events”. You can then create an album and add them in. Also, don’t forget to delete the “Lightroom Export” folder on the Desktop! To make it even easier the next time, you can add an Export User Preset with the above settings, named it to something like “Export to iPhoto”, and when need to export photos again, just use File -> Export With Presets, and select “Export to iPhoto”. Viola!

Alternatively, you can use Automator to create an application that selects specific folder with the Lightroom exported photos, import them into iPhoto, and then delete the temporary folder. I tried this out but found that all the photos imported into iPhoto are duplicated, and I can’t figure out why.  All is not lost though, since the above solution is good enough for me already – just need to remember to delete the temporary folder!