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

The method you describe of a shared folder of originals and moving the lcat folder and previews around is a basic form of sharing that we do at home - local lcat pointing to the shared folder.

No, i mean create new catalogs per user, pointing to published originals. I do, do the above for quick and dirty

It's like a kitchen: Buy an expensive Kitchen and install it yourself and it'll look ok, buy a cheap Kitchen and get an expert to install it, it'll look better than the kitchen worth 5 times as much. Bear with me ;)

I have a product up and running on Mongo, it's been in production at a big corp site for about a year. In fact, anything you watched of the Olympics last year was probably held in a mongo DB

The method you describe of a shared folder of originals and moving the lcat folder and previews around is a basic form of sharing that we do at home - local lcat pointing to the shared folder.

For home use this is "fine" - in an I can yell at it but live with it kind of way, but it presents issues with the lcat folder being huge, and laptops being wireless and time being at a premium.

Plus, to move from her machine to mine, to the kids and everything in between, well it's a pain at the best of times.

Any develop edits made to the originals of course remain in the shared area, but to "see" what has been changed and access those on another machine, you have to load/copy/move that lcat folder to that machine. Or have two lcats and always "synchronize" which does not grab metadata unless you have sidecars.

Publishing is simply a "live export" folder and is great for final copies for, well, publishing, but not for live access tracking over multiple machines, nor do collections apply on independent lcats.

If the lcat folder could be read by multiple machines, then all the woes vanish, regardless of even where the photos are stored. (we are not dealing with cloud stuff here, just local access)

So whether you want multi users at once, or multi machine access incrementally, there's just simply no option but manual, migration, exporting, copying, and scripting.

Now if it's only ME using the lcat, then yeah, i can - and do all of the above to manage my crap - and I have extensive and private cloud access on my own servers, so I'm not worried about access for me when I'm out and about - but it's still insanely time consuming (and slow since you still need to transfer data).

And honestly, since i DO know better, I simply cannot remain quiet any more, because I'm so much more tired of being spoon fed by companies that dole out functionality bit by bit whilst advertising how awesome some "newly invented" basic function is (that everyone else has had for years) - when they finally release a tidbit in the "next" upgrade - when ever that is.

*cough* iphone cut and paste....

Try adding a collaborative environment where you have multiple editors trying to manage a client production, and you're simply out of luck - without bizarre and overly complicated workflows - so you're limited to harassing one guy on one machine.

CS6 is the last upgrade I'll be doing with Adobe until they start giving back. I've paid for the right to have competency, and I'm not seeing it.

I hear that... I'm familiar with mongo as well, and though I'm a staunch supporter of open source - to keep one size fitting all - and to not simply duplicate similar problems that have arisen by choosing the open source SQLite - it's best to stick with tried and true... Ya know?
It's like the devil you know - but with volumes of support options, fixes and forums... There will always be some thing perceived as better "for this reason or that" but it's the easiest path to take if adobe makes an effort.

Sure, I see where you're coming from, but I have to produce, and waiting for Adobe to fix stuff, well. I'll be broke and homeless before they address a lot of the fundamental stuff. So, I have no option but to make it work

I don't personally use an iMac but I know lots of shooters that do, even taking them to shoots, shooting tethered. They are fairly small to lug around. I use a Mac Pro for my studio work and a Macbook Pro for location stuff. I tend to copy my catalog folder over to the Mac Pro after location work, then copy media and update the path.

This is where I do disagree with a lot of people, in that a program was never custom built for just one person, it wasn't built to serve my workflow anymore than it was to serve yours. Aside all the things you expect 'in the box' as far as photographic necessity, there are many things that just need to be custom built to serve the specific client needs.

Re: Flickr. Exactly, and I think that's what one has to do.

One thing we haven't touched on and as an idea. As far as Multiple person environments are concerned, have you tried to publish original format (DNG or other RAW) images onto shared Storage, then each person builds their own catalog? Ok, so you aren't sharing catalogs, but you are sharing media that has been designated to be shared. Each user can then build up their own catalogs and export them. Assuming you have all the media on shared storage, paths will be the same

true, but one size should fit "most"
Lightroom only does so superficially.
All of my "arguing" has always and only been about the inherent core flaw of choosing SQLite. Changing that is rather easy as SQlite is based on mySQL so it's not a huge endeavour.

What I'm not interested in is asking for "one size should only fit me" as that's why we have other business to acquire "add ons" and "plugins" from... so I can customize - like you have.
But the core framework should be just awesome to build from initially.
With the cost of Adobe apps in general and recurring and "fundamental" issues being unaddressed, I can do little else but sit here and loose faith.

I like heathy debate... :)
... the lada reference is more toward lightroom - but does lean also to using a juiced up imac - an imac should be fine for smaller efforts - or single user scenarios, but you have to expand with external devices, so it's mac pros and pc's for me... Nothing wrong with the hardware, it's just not beefy enough for my world. In my work flow (and mine is not yours) simply in terms of equipment, it is a lada.

Hey, i think it's great you got your workflow going, but in a multi-production, multi-person, multi-user environment, having to resort to "published folders", and exporting, and drop box, and external drives, and scripting and all that nightmare should just never come into play except when you want "more".

It's like this - adobe made a very usable Flickr plugin, but JFflickr is far superior - so I bought it. That's simply a choice, and it's made in lieu of the fact there is a perfectly decent plugin "free" with lightroom - I just wanted "more".

Right off the bat though adobe negated a future implementation of file sharing. That's just silly. So no, I'm not going to download a script here and there and add yet more gear to "browbeat lightroom into submission" because I can't - in the end it's still "broke" till they "fix it".

No, in an idea world it should be all things to all men, but we don't live in Eldorado so you just have to make the best out of what you can scrape together. There's never a 'one fits all' solution dude.