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

For Dan and the other "employees" logging in here:
I also don't get then how this hasn't been implemented - if you yourselves find it annoying.
You waste all these coding resources on absolute duplicate crap it's astounding - Revel... seriously?
We HAVE lightroom, it catalogs and "bare bones" edits pics.
We HAVE publish services already.
We HAVE Bridge to link our files (and barely have a useful workflow)
We HAVE photoshop to powerhouse through image modifications and creation.
We HAVE creative cloud already - so stuff whatever editing features you like into - oh i don't know - PS Express the iOS app you ALREADY have and be done with it.

Just because Adobe wants to have yet one more incredibly redundant and completely mainstream quadruplicated lack luster and ill coded implementation of yet another subscription to some privacy data mining cloud service just like everyone else, doesn't mean Adobe "and also" has the right to avoid general improvements to the software we're already paying for, have paid for, and are finding less and less reason to continue to pay for.

and it's not just about multi-use or multi-computer access, and you know it.

Stop wasting resources on following the masses and start offering software like you USED to make - that made the MASSES follow YOU.

Stop lowering the bar, because free software has already caught up, and others like me are implementing it more and more.

That's simply because they don't need to care, these forums are full of our "needs" but they always have a convenient and uneducated reply.

I wonder constantly now why I bother spending thousands every few years on what is increasingly becoming poorer and poorer implementation of what once was an awesome thing.

If you don't need it, you don't use it. If you need it you have the option.
There would be no performance impact in "single user mode".

so please don't "foist" your "opinion" about what people may or may not need when plainly you can see people need this as an option - myself and my computers being one of them.

That you may not require such a feature means you have one machine you work on. And that's great for YOU.

Don't knock a practical feature for the rest of us that require multiple access to our data. Especially since "network sharing" is not a "new" concept.

That adobe cheaped out and went with "free" SQLlite is what is causing the issue - they didn't want to use a proper full SQL implementation, and that decision is the "truth" behind their described "database issues" over a network.

So. Their reasoning is poppycock. My filemaker and other sql databases aren't destroyed when a "network" hiccup occurs.

Ok! as i do a lot of video work lately and specially time-lapse,
(this one is one of them : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhieIn...),

I end up with having to crunch 170 000 5DMKIII 21 Mpixel raw file because I want to be able to make the color correction and adjustment I want, and keep the High Iso, and exposure latitude ability of the camera, so my customers have issue to understand why I need 15 day to get a preview......

( by the way - totally out of topic-) if you could do a "part of a time-lapse" check box in develop mode were we tell the software to see the "X" image we have set up as a reference point to do a smooth setting transition between different settings in the " sync parameter " button...)

ok back to the topic !

In one of the other great product of Adobe called After Effect, there is a way to export the images sequences on multiple machine : you have a destination folder that is common to all the machines you want to work with, and you set up the export setting in your main project ( call this catalogue if you want ;-), save it and duplicate it on every machine (with the media if your network is slow) and just tell him to not overwrite existing image.... brilliant ! then you open After effect and the project on each client machine and hit "render" : Voila !!!!! even if you have 5 cheap machine it goes a lot faster than only with one high-end machine.

so one feature that would again push In favor of multi-user would be to be able to set up a "collaborative folder" witch would actually be a folder with :
- one alias of your own original catalogue+ XML side cart file with your setting for each image....
- one temp file with files being selected/worked on
- one "export watch folder" with ability for the software to create a "virtual file" of what he is exporting like in After Effect and that allows other user to be aware of image that being worked on and exported. like this there could be a export mode where file already exported wont have to be exported again if they have the same settings.
- a "master mode" that would allow to view if there is several version of the same image with different setting across each user of the collaborative folder and show them as a "stack" with the opportunity to select/merge/flatten/delete one or several version of setting to those image.... and make a watch folder for the other with file to process....

like this we could do 2 main things :

Allow several person to work on a same image folder across the network, and be aware of what the others are doing.

People who, like me, need several times a week to do an export of very large amount of file ( 30 000 x 21 megapixel raw file is a lot of data) , could do it with several machine with a "share the export load over the network" button... why?

because I happened to notice splitting my images folder over :

my Macbook pro I7 quad 2,3
+ my old G4
+ my mac mini server I7 quad 2,0
+ my girlfriend Macbook pro Core2duo 2,7

to have them export smaller batch of 1000 file actually go faster than my 12 core beast with 64 gigs of ram and Twin SSD + 8 bay sonnet SAS RAid 6 drive.....

i cant afford to buy a second MacPro 12 core like this, but i can totally buy 5 mac mini server and stack them together in a closet to have them render the files in a shared effort...

because 1 Mac Pro like mine is 7K and for that price i can have 5 mac mini server with twin hhd in raid 0 and 16 gb of ram + 5 Lightroom license.
with the one I already have that would be a 24 core I7.

being even more silly (and illega)l if Adobe decide to port GPU acceleration to Lightroom, for 7K i could totally picture myself building 6 Hackintosh with a I7 3770K , 32 gb of ram, a 120 gb SSD and a GTX680..... in elcheapo enclosure..

and i can promise that with 24 I7 core at 4,5 ghz (48 tread!!!!) over 9000 cuda cores GPU acceleration + 6 SSD , this setup will be way more powerful than any "XEON super mac pro" money could buy....

So Mr ADOBE if you want to sell me 5 more licenses of Lightroom, and sell a lot of license to other people, come on give us the "collaborative folder " option !!!!!

and NO NO NO i don't want to do this "in the cloud" as i have invested so much money in fast storage solution and Fiber channel.....

My Lightroom 4 is collecting dust. I've gone back to just using Bridge and Photoshop CS6 as I found LR4 way to difficult in my simple home network.
I am no tech. Just a photographer wanting easy access and security for my photo collection. I seen some folks with creative work arounds but that just too complicated for me.
My 50,000+ and growing photos and videos are stored on my home NAS (Raid 1) that I access from my both my laptop and desktop and backup to additional devices.

There are two types of drives. One's that have failed and one's that has yet to fail.
So I keep backups on two devices at home and a thrid offsite.

Makes no sense to me that its almost 2013 and 4 generations in, and Adobe makes a data management product like this that only works on a local drive.

Hi all.

I also want to say, that a multi-user feature would be really really great feature, so that in our small company we could work simultanously on the same catalog at a time - not on the same file.
Now it is a real pain for us to work with lightroom with more than 1 person and sharing the files. Because if we want to work on fotos at the same time, we just can use the xmp container and sync these file but cannot use the possibilities that lightroom has.

It would be really great to see this in the near future.

greetings and merry christmas

Nothing fancy...but I want to lend my voice to this. I'm merely a "home" user. I have a wife...and kids...and tons of photos. And video. Did I mention we have kids? Our library is upwards of 30,000 photos and just gigs of video. And as we've all said...it's not getting smaller. I'm responsible for the technicalities of getting the images from the various devices onto our NAS (Windows Server) while my wife is in charge of finding photos for whatever. We both tag, edit etc - multi-user would be a God-send. So far, we've been using the multi-colored-logo, free, photo-editor with face-recognition...and just are reaching it's limitations...thus the search to see if LR4 would be a better fit...multi-user would be a killer-app scenario.

Awesome - thanks Dan: good to know...

PS - I just updated LightroomStartupScript (v1.2) to check for journal file and handle appropriately.

Two things:
1. Make sure you always close Lightroom when you're done before switching to another machine.
2. Make sure that dropbox is fully up to date before opening the catalog.

These are things you would want to do anyway, but syncing catalogs this way makes it all the more important.

Even if it did crash on one system, the -journal recovery should work if opened on a different system, but if there's multiple people involved it could also be a sign that the other system is actively using the catalog since ordinarily Lightroom won't leave a -journal on quit.

Of course, all you folks religiously perform integrity checks and make backups. This is another good reason to do that.

Thank you Dan - useful info, yet begs the question:

What must one do to assure the catalog is never corrupted due to journal/lrcat mismatch?

e.g. would it be sufficient to always restart Lightroom on "Machine A" if it is killed/stopped/crashes, before syncing lrcat file?

I suppose this same potential for problem exists when restoring a backup lrcat file too, eh?