Adobe Lightroom 6 Will Only Be Compatible with 64-Bit Operating Systems

If you want to stay up to date with Adobe’s Lightroom software, you’ll need to make sure you’re up to date with the latest operating systems. Adobe has announced that Lightroom 6 will only be compatible with 64-bit operating systems.

The company is “hard at work on the next major release of Lightroom,” it says. By announcing this compatibility restriction early, it hopes to give photographers time to prepare their hardware for the software release.

“In order to leverage the latest operating system features and technologies,” Lightroom 6 will require at least OS X 10.8 — Mountain Lion, a 64-bit OS — for Mac users or a 64-bit version of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1.

Instead of trying to make their program fully compatible with older hardware, the company is instead choosing to focus on adding user-requested features that need the latest operating systems to work — things like advanced imaging features and faster performance.

Photographers who use 32-bit operating systems will still be able to run Lightroom 5, but the upgrade path will end there.