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

Any application that stores it's things (like the catalog) in the user profile directory, is intrinsically multi-user, since the user profile directory is separate for each user. That says nothing about networking, but one could imagine mapping that folder to a networked folder.

It will be slow, though.

Even on a gigabit LAN. Even on ten-gigabit LAN. Because latency is thousands of times higher than local disk access.

As for a shared catalog. It is hard to build something like that. VERY HARD. Many have tried and many have failed. Creating some kind of shared database on a network you know nothing about, used by an unknown number of clients you know nothing about is not just asking for trouble... it's falling onto your knees and begging for trouble.

I'm glad Adobe does not dive into this.

well what should happened have happened, one of my customer have canceled one of the " arty guy who shoot with strobes and in raw" photographer of the pool and have replaced him with News guy who shot in jpeg because : "he gets the photo online straight away and he works with photo mechanics so caption injection is a no brainer " .

so now we still have the Instagram guy from last year+ a news guy ....

and we are two "real photographer" down

the photo desk's head don't want to hear about Lightroom.

If i had a way to have a global home catalog that would host sub catalog and give the ability of just captioning and rating photo of the whole group, we would be using lightroom.... and we would just hand our cards to him.

now we have to import, select, rate, and caption in photo mechanic, then we need to send this selection in lightroom to process the raw file, then we need to export to JPEG on a USB stick and give the usb stick to him.....

while we do that, the "News Guy" is already back on location and shooting....

so first of all do exactly like you want but please ADOBE I suggest that you look at the speed of photo mechanic, and who the h*** care about a slideshow function, GIVE US A PROPER CAPTION TOOL ;-)

professional ALL caption their images, otherwise they can't sale it.....

if i need to do a slide show I will use a slideshow software !

so

1) SPEED IN LIBRARY MODE ( same as photo mechanic)
2) BETTER CAPTION (( same as photo mechanic)
3) even if you dont do multi user, just let the APP open a catalogue thru a network, even if it is just in library mode.... or maybe just do a "Library client" that allow captioning, rating and selection thru a gigabyte network !

if you look on the web you will see a ton of post about people having to use both software to get the job done !

You can see that over a year ago, we engaged in a spirited exchange about adding multi-user access (using record-level locking). Adobe needs to devote serious efforts to make this possible. I understand that this might require a different licencing model to protect Adobe. I would suggest a home model for up to three users on the same net, a small business version, and a professional or Enterprise model that would allow large organizations to work together sharing the same database of photos.

If the will is there, Adobe will make this happen. It would be a shame to have to convert to some competitor's product just to get this capability.

|> "even synchronizing a catalog between a laptop and a desktop Lightroom is seriously deficient"

Exporting / importing catalog works pretty good - have you tried it?

Not good for using catalog in different rooms of the house, each of which has a different computer. But for taking catalog on the road in laptop, and synchronizing upon return, it has an appropriate synchronization feature. (won't handle synchronizing changes made in *both* versions, but allows easily updating one with changes made to the other).

No, it means one thing you said you want is possible, the other currently isn't .

Your local catalog can reference photos stored on a network drive. It's the catalog (lrcat file) that cannot be on the network.

Which means it's not networkable. I can't open up my catalog from any workstation. As a great first step you should be able to open up the catalog over the network (not as multi user). That would initially solve a lot of problems. Then solve the multi user issue.

Lightroom does support images stored on networks. What it does not currently allow is putting its catalogue on the network.

I use a few computers in our studio and would like to Lightroom use a central storage location when it comes to storing images. Maybe like a network version. I've asked others and they say Lightroom does not support network usage. Another thing I'd like to see is a better "presetation module". Something similar to ProSelect. I'd like to trim down my software packages. Thanks.

You're absolutely correct, and when they implement an actual database solution that can handle the load of such a massive file - and a rendering solution that doesn't bog down the whole program, then yes, I'll have one database... As it stands - a "scenery" catalog doesn't need to be "normally" searchable when I'm also using a "people" catalog.
But I sure would like the option of the two open at a time lol.

But that type of thing would be a silly request if the underlying core can't even run one "well". So I'm stuck at the basics of wanting a database that "works" with all it's databassy options.

And as a total bonus - with a true database, you can easily link to another database and have them chit chat - again we're left with simply needing a better core solution than SQlite.