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Jeffrey Friedl "mostly retired"

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camner

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:eek:
I was looking something up on his website about one of his plug-ins, and I noticed that right above the box,where one enters a comment he wrote ,
IMPORTANT: I'm mostly retired, so I don't check comments often anymore, sorry.
Jeffrey has been such an important part of the success of Lightroom Classic through his wonderful plug-ins that have extended greatly the usability of LR. Countless users depend upon his plug-ins to add features (and extend existing features). He has been doing this for a long time, so it is not surprising that at some point he would take a step back. The hours he spends on maintaining and improving his plug-ins are beyond what most of us mere mortals would be able to manage! Hopefully, "mostly retired" means I won't be nearly as active, but I intend to keep the existing plug-ins working through future releases of LR, as long as I can do so while maintaining my "mostly retired'" status.

Aside from letting the LR Classic community know about this, I think it is fitting that we publicly acknowledge his great contributions to making LRC success.
 
I agree. jf's plugin's have set a standard of quality, usefulness, and value to a large number of LrC users. I don't know how many people he counts as customers or what sort of revenue stream new customers and upgrade customers provide but I suspect it's not trivial given the number of folks that depend on these tools. When my clients need such tools I always encourage them to donate liberally to the plugin author and ask them consider how much of their valuable time having access to one plugin or another has saved them and what is that amount of time worth.

Even though it is a different situation, I recall when the magnificent Plugin author Rob Cole, suddenly went dark. It wasn't untill several months later that we found out that he had passed away. RIP Rob Cole. But, the negative impact to the LR community was severe as apparently Rob had made no arrangements for passing ownership of his work to someone else who could pick up the mantel (and revenue stream). I still use several of Rob's plugin's that I've nursed ahead from release to release and I thank my stars that they are mostly still usable to some degree but I sure do wish someone had been given the opportunity to officially take over Rob's plugin's.

I would like to encourage all successful independent SW engineers to have some sort of succession plan for the continuation of their life's work should they no longer wish to, or are no longer able to, maintain thier products.

I would support some recogniction effort for jf if somehting get's put together.
 
The retirement message has been there for months (see this thread). I've used LrC for over 10 years nearly daily and JF's metadata plugins are essential to my workflow. I've been able to tell him that as we corresponded to address a bug here and there over the years, and I always tried to recognize the value of these plugins to me as I renewed the licenses at each new major version.
 
I'm relying on quite a few plugins by Jeffrey as well, first and foremost the incredible jfFlickr plugin, for which I don't see any replacement looking at the way how I'm using this. That's why with every LR major release I donate for using these wonderful utilities.

Even though I don't begrudge Jeffery a fulfilled retirement (like I'm enjoying it myself) it scares me thinking about the moment when a new LR release introduces critical incompatibilities with jfFlickr and there is nobody to look into that and fix it.
 
I suspect folk shouldn't worry about Jeffrey using the word "retired" (please give the URL for this).

While I may be wrong, he's not typical retirement age and my impression is that he simply does not need to work and doesn't treat LR plugins as a day job.
 
Thanks. I'm certain he will have phrased it carefully.
 
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