I was a day later than the official 2.7 release, but today I got around to upgrading to the final version of 2.7.  I must say that coming from RC1 was about a 1 minute upgrade.  I was able to make use of the new automatic upgrade feature in the administration area.  A couple of clicks later and I was on my way.

I was able to use the same one-click update for some plugins I have installed.  If you have looked at some of my picture galleries you are looking at the NextGEN Gallery plugin.  I am excited about several new features in this release, the one you immediately can take advantage of is the cooliris image viewer.

I highly recommend you download this browser plugin.  It creates a 3D wall of images and video that are really fun to browse through.  You can now use this feature on all my picture galleries.

If don’t already know, I use Adobe Lightroom as my photo manager and developer. I won’t get into all the specifics here, but suffice it to say that it has a ton of features advanced amateurs and professional photographers alike will find useful.

One of the killer features of the program is the plugin support. You can add plugins to perform specific actions to streamline your workflow beyond the features built-in to Lightroom. I have been using the flickr exporter for a while.  I finally installed another plugin which performs several operations, but I was specifically interested in the border feature.  The plugin is called LR Mogrify, it was written by Tim Armes.  Check out Tim’s page for a quick howto and installation guide.  It’s pretty straight-forward, I had the plugin installed and running in under 10 minutes.  As I am running Vista, I had to also the ImageMagick conversion utilities prior to the plugin installation.

The nice thing about this plugin is that it is actually called a post-process filter, which means you can use the features on any of the Export functions in Lightroom.  This will allow me to get a consistent output if I am generating a jpg to upload to my website or sending an image to flickr.

There are lots of options to play with, but here is a quick example of a simple 2-border option I created.  I plan to do some more experimenting with the plugin to create more advanced “matte looking” borders.