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

okay I simply HAVE to chime in again...
I use databases every. single. day.
and I would bet dollars to donuts that this very forum is MySQL driven, so please don't muddy the waters with "opinions" about "database performance".

MySQL does just fine in a workgroup of say 20-100 people with 5000+ polls on the database per second, it's why it's the defacto goto database for the web.

SQLite is NOT built to be share friendly depending on file system - so what will work for mac will not work for windows due to the open source SQLite and closed "read licensing requirements" source of MS's NTFS filesytem.

There is no reason why the catalogue can't be shared on any "mainstream" network. Be it at home or in a corporate environment. It just wasn't written that way because adobe was lazy, and cheap. Which I might ad on the later was a bit refreshing as the weak product didn't cost a fortune like the rest of CS...

There is ALSO no need for a "server" to implement this. Cripes you can use windows 3.1 and mac os 7, a router, or heck, even a simple hub, and click "share folder" and you're done. So there's you're high tech complicated ability to share something all blown to away.

Going on about raid and servers and gigabit networks are all well and good but they do not make for anything other than redundancy for back up and speed.

To sum up, it would not take "years" to rewrite lightroom to work on mySQL.

So please those of your chiming in that it would be nice to see sharing, and why you need it - just leave it at that. It's tiring to read justified rants that are also misguided.

Yes, as I said, MySQL. That's the reason it's not server based, MySQL isn't very good with wide search criteria at the best of times, given many attached users to a database makes it worse. It's not a great database model to begin with.

"At least working from a server with RAID and programmed backups will provide a fall back position for a corrupt catalog"

Yes, but it has to be local to prevent a catastrophic fail to begin with. Otherwise you'll only be going back to a corrupt version.

" the catalog is GONE when the HD fails"

I'm not sure you read my post. The catalog is saved locally in a cache or catalog file, then sent up to the server, but only when it has been completed(checksum complete). Therefore, you ALWAYS have a good copy because A, you have a local copy, B, that local copy has been checked and uploaded to a sever. Then even if your local HD fails, your catalog is safe on the server. This ENSURES that you DO NOT back up corrupt catalogs or losse data saving across network storage

To use Dropbox which is totally unencrypted and rife for hacking is probably not a wise choice, but I have just described that exact server workflow in the previous post

It would be great if Adobe would make such a definitive statement so I will know if I should be shopping for a LR replacement. I will not buy any future upgrades that don't include network catalog support. Not just for the image files, but for the lrcat file as well!!

If Adobe doesn't get it together, there will be many more of us joining your colleagues as ex-users of LR. Adobe seems to be trying to eliminate LR from the product lineup by not providing what the customers want.

LR is already on SQL. The problem is that Adobe chose to use SQLlite instead of full blown SQL. At least working from a server with RAID and programmed backups will provide a fall back position for a corrupt catalog. In the current forced method, unless someone is dedicated to doing their own backup, the catalog is GONE when the HD fails. HD failure is not an if scenario, but is just a matter of when. Thankfully, using dropbox to keep the lrcat file synced provides not only a backup, but a work around to this Adobe forced limitation. By using selective sync and only syncing the lrcat file instead of the all the previews, dropbox is a fairly quick solution to a single user, multiple location problem. Maybe Adobe should contract with dropbox to teach the Adobe engineers how to make it work.

You make a valid point about corrupt files. However, LR nor adobe can be responsible for poor implementation of servers, raid and back up / fail over. This is what you get into once talking about shared solutions.

But, there should ALWAYS be a local copy of a catalog(in metadata, whether that be a cache file or a full catalog), when data has been written to that local copy, it is then sent to the remote location, (which could be a preference in LR)but only until the local copy has been completed. Therefore you always have your data.

Working from servers although widely used in corporate environments has it's downsides, I think a more fluid way to export as catalog and relink media should deal with most people's needs. For example, talking about Florian Kleinschmidt's workflow. For Florian to do all the mobile work, create catalog and log. Then once back in the office, save catalog in a 'collect for output' stage, like a pre flight step, then for the media to be updated via a 'update media location' menu click

This doesn't solve you doing the same thing multiple times a day, but surely by working from your laptop, compiling media then doing the export 'once' is easier than doing it lots of times. OK, so you have small SSD drives, you could use external FW or thunderbolt in order to give you more storage, that's not a limitation of adobe and LR but a limitation of your workflow and equipment used.

For LR to be re coded with MySQL in order to use server based and server based search queries will take a fair few years I would imagine.

Well, I would think that the solution with a disk image mounted over the network is even more vulnerable.

If you write to a file on a remote server, and the network connection is lost, this file will of course be corrupted. But the file system on the remote server will still be intact since that is handled by the remote server which still has contact to the disk.

But if you mount a disk image from a remote server and writes to a file inside this disk image, and the connection is lost, you also lose the connection between the file system and the computer which handles the file system. This means that you risk corrupting the entire disk image, not only the single file you were writing to.

In my opinion, a shared catalog should run as a dedicated network service. So instead of sharing a file on a server, a database server application should run on that server, and each Lightroom installation should be a client to that database server. This is the best way to ensure data integrity and avoid locking problems.

Of course that would probably also mean that Adobe would feel entitled to demand a very high price for the server software so it would be out of reach for anyone who doesn't make a living editing photos - including me.

At this point I would be very happy if it was possible to have a catalog, on the network, with a basic locking mechanism so that only one user could access it at a time.

However... the catalog would also need to map the image directories on the network so that a user on a different computer would not have to re-map each directory (or Update the Folder Location, to use Lightroom terminology).

We have tens of thousands of images which cannot be split into separate projects ... and because of this limitation we are having to use the one PC to do all of the selecting, rating, editing, developing, publishing etc. That means that one PC has to be dedicated to the task, and if one of us needs to work on the images we have to physically walk over to the PC to do the work.

I've been watching this thread and I see that an Adobe employee, Dan Tull, is keeping an eye on it ... but I would like Adobe to make a definitive statement on whether or not it will implement some form of catalog sharing and when we can expect it.

Here's another vote for a multi-machine support.
I'm working for a local newspaper and I'm the only one in the team still using lightroom.
The reason my colleagues (and often me too) got frustrated is simple: Most of the time we have to work on location with mobile computers. After the assignment we have to import the catalogue from our mobile netbooks to our main computers with the attached network storage. That means, that we have to do this kind of switch many times a day (we only have small SSDs on our netbooks)!
I love how easy you can edit RAW-images on the run in Lightroom but - to be honest - the workflow is a pain in the... . And I don't think that it is that "exotic".
Please solve this problem. You would save us so much time.
It would be worth it.

Have you got more than one machine that you edit images on?

Are you tired of having to export and import your settings in order to get all your machines the same?

Wouldn't networked drives with media make so much more sense?

How about Lightroom Server? A central place that holds all your catalog specific data, presets and settings which is then rolled out via a server?

Lightroom clients can log on and download settings