Lightroom 4 on Windows 8

After a couple of busy weeks and even busier weekends I finally managed to migrate my home workstation to Windows 8 RTM. Lightroom was on top of my pre- and post- installation lists. The whole procedure was not completed as quickly as expected, but overall I'm happy with the results. It's easy to forget something in the heat of a battle and that's why I'm sharing my experience. Before any raw details - a few words about my workstation. Base is Sony Vaio (AW series) with 2 internal drives (small/fast SSD and large/slow HDD) + 2nd monitor and external drives. One of the reason behind this plain installation (OS drive format) was the fact that Windows7 was able to find a way to use tens of gigabytes on my small SSD drive (winsxs, history of upgrades, releases, hotfixes) forcing me to read and learn about its internals. There was not much I could do about winsxs to get my space back and so I started using Link Shell Extension for Lightroom's previews and backups (I moved them to a different drive - you can find some good posts explaining how to do it). A taste of things to come:

Drive letters
It's messed up every time I reinstall my system. Obvious dependency and it's easy to fix. Just connect all your external drives (avoid surprise later on) and assign the correct letters. It can be done in Disk Management console (Win key-X, then k) or DiskPart (Win key - R -> cmd -> diskpart)

Lightroom 4.1 64bit
No problems here! I'm happy to confirm it's fully compatible with new Windows. I've tried import, develop modules with raws/jpegs, basic video. It's stable with no signs of hangs/glitches. Very good performance, better then Win7, probably because of improved memory management, but it requires further tests.

Link Shell Extension
I don't think that Windows 8 is better at saving space (12GB after installation) and decided to use LSExt again. It works fine, after smooth installation new options are available in context menu (process asks to restart Explorer which is ok - no hard reboot required).

Publish Services: Hard Drive
All services were available after I opened my main catalog (I use one catalog and bucket system). One of the original destinations was on drive that had been formatted and folder structure had to be recreated. Skipping this step will cause some problems (publish action throws warning messages). Unfortunately there's no way of changing destination that I'm aware of. At this point I removed half of services. Clean installation motivates to rethink usage patterns.

Publish Services: 500px plugin 
Plugin was missing (there was a message under the Publish Services) and I had to download the latest version from 500px.com. Next copy-copy to folder with plugins (in my case C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.1\) and that's it. Next time I opened LR it asked me to convert catalog to be able to use new plugin (can't remember exact question), but it was related to newer version of 500px plugin I reckon.

QuickTime
'Video export may fail if QuickTime is not installed'. Well - self-explanatory. Somehow InternetExplorer10 doesn't like apples and I had to use Chrome to download it. QuickTime is compatible with Windows 8.

All the small things
There can be a lot of settings you can use that you may not remember about (presets, keywords, lens profiles etc). Take your time before re-installation when it's not too late. I forgot about camera raw and video cache settings.

I used version RTM, which will be available publicly on October 26th. Would I recommend moving to Windows 8? It's minimalistic, cleaner, faster with better monitoring tools (task manager, copy details) - great if you already like using shortcuts.

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