P: Allow Catalog to be stored on a networked drive.

I made my original post to provide a comment for Adobe to consider a feature revision, not for third party advertisement of what is likely a good workaround.

You can use Daminion Server and Lightroom together: Lightroom to adjust and publish your photos, Daminion to create a shared archive library that can be accessed from multiple computers.

You can ask how these product can be connected each other. It's easy, via metadata: both program support writing metadata into images, including hierarchical keywords.

Ability to store and work from Lightroom catalogue files on a server. This is a significant barrier for some of us to purchasing additional licenses and increased use of the application. Everything else is great about it; I understand why this doesn't work, but the program should be designed so it should work. This is an inexcusable fault in this day and age.

The obvious answer is to use a major release to upgrade to a standard SQL database and dump the lite database. Hopefully Adobe is smart enough to use release 6 to accomplish this task and enable a basic feature that SHOULD have been present in release 1!!!!! Adobe claims to produce products for professionals but then doesn't include a basic feature required for professional studio use. Network sharing is standard operating practice in any business and Adobe has failed miserably at this with LR.

The issue is that the catalog is an SQLite database. SQLite is meant to be used in-process and does not have the proper provisions for remote/multi access that would make it able to deal with or recover properly from connection failures, concurrent accesses, etc.

Multi-user concurrent catalog access is difficult. As a baby step, please enable network catalog storage, single user. For bonus points, provide an excel-like UI that says "the catalog is current open by another user. Would you like to wait for it become available for use?"

The stated reasoning that prevents Lightroom catalog storage on a file share -- "There are too many variables in a network configuration to guarantee that the catalog won't get corrupted." is @%#$#$%^.It might have been true in 1993, but it sure isn't today. You've heard of the Cloud, right? Oh, yes, that's right. you have. Please get this much needed feature into a release soon. It is more true on a Mac, because their network stack's quality is ludicrous, but it's still good enough even on a Mac to support.

Thanks Jim, but how do you *not* do develop work this way if your catalog is on the network? Do you have local *and* shared catalogs...?

Performance, yes it will be slower, how much slower depends on a lot of things and what you are doing. For me, I just want to give my wife the ability to tag and rate photos. The other way to do this is to export a part of a catalog then integrate it later.

I wouldn't try and do Develop work this way, unless you really know what you are doing on the backend, perhaps NAS over fiber.

So, you *are* having your catalog on the net, using this method?

If so, I (and others, no doubt) have two questions for you:
1. have you ever had your catalog become corrupt? (more than once?...).
2. Have you noticed a performance penalty? (if so, in which context(s)).

This work-around has been known for a long time, but most Adobe advocates discourage it, so most users are too scared to do it.

?