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

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
May 1, 2011
559 replies
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I'd love to make LR more multi-computer friendly. I have no doubt that there's probably database architecture issues and a host of other barriers... But I have to believe that the need for either multi-user or at at lease multi-computer use is widely desired. And yes, I know you can do the catalog import export thing but I find this less than ideal.

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dtull

Participating Frequently

No excluding the -journal could be very dangerous. The key thing is to make sure that you have a -journal and an lrcat that match each other.

The theoretical problem cases are of this form:
1. Machine A begins a transaction and writes a -journal file.
2. Machine A continues to update the lrcat file.
3. Lightroom is killed/stopped/crashes.
3. Dropbox uploads the (small) -journal file.
4. Dropbox starts analyzing and sending the lrcat file changes.
5. Machine B syncs up the new -journal file.
6. Lightroom (on machine B) launches and opens its existing lrcat file and applies the new journal to it, corrupting the catalog file and deleting the -journal when it is done.
7. Dropbox finishes syncing the lrcat file, creating a new conflicting version (on machine B) that requires the (now deleted) -journal file to be opened.
8. Dropbox propagates the deletion of the -journal file to machine A.
9. Lightroom is re-opened on machine A with an lrcat that can no longer be restored properly without its -journal file.

So now we have both machine A and B in a bad place with respect to their lrcat files. Usually such states should be highly transient (almost hard to hit), but knowing they exist is better than assuming that the worst you'll get is a conflicted copy of the lrcat.

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christian Van hanja

Participating Frequently

I know that most people like to have one catalogue for all their pictures but coming from film, i alway liked to have my different shoots organized by shoot event.
back in the day with film, you would do your edit on a contact sheet and put that contact sheet in a folder with the negatives. this is exactly how i do it.
All my images folder have the same structure:
SHOOT_NAME/ (4 folder = SHOOT_NAME_CATA, RAW, EXPORTS, VIDEO)
like this if I move an image folder, I will just need to reconnect the media of that particular folder, not all the library.

most of the time i do this folder on location when i shoot and then migrate it on the server as soon as i am back to the office for safety.

but as i might work on it several day after even being far from the office, i have to keep a copy on my laptop in order to be able to work on it.
If i do so, I have to dump and re- copy the whole folder on my server... to keep it up to date... MAJOR PITA

therefore it would be pure genius if i could open the catalogue file thru the local network, or even better thru the web, and have the SERVER at my office do the job. the client app would be just a web based app that can control the software on my server by something like screen sharing.

I could then edit , convert and ask the server to export 10 000 pictures with no worries, as it would just be command lines, the effective work being done by my server at the office.

the other benefit would be that at the office i could be working on my laptop while my assistant is doing a "pré-selection" on raw picture of the same catalogue.

the last and not the least benefit would be on photo pool shoot :

when I shoot for large event such as ESPN XGAMES, or FISE, or BMX MASTERS, I have to deal with several issue :

1) even if being on Lightroom , other photographers have their own workflow.
2) as lightroom is weird for captioning, most of the guys use Photomechanics
3) as all the photographer that i work with mostly works in RAW, some of them need to tweak their shot by themselves, no one can do it for them.
4)the photo editor of those event need the pictures right away and need to see all the photo of an event at the same time to make a choose within the whole range of picture of all the photographer. sometime he is oversea, and with the jet lag, he might not want to wait to much to go back home....
5) an editing software that can not import IPTC captioning template, you must be kidding me?

So by the time I am done with importing, editing, processing, captioning,exporting and submitting my shots, the others sport photographers who shoot available light at high iso with no strobe and with 10fps camera in jpeg, are already done and back to shoot ... and gess what : the editor alway tell me the same thing : your shots are great and maybe better, but we needed them 20 minutes ago...
the funny part is that we all get back from the shoot at the same time, and while we are doing the card download/process, the editor is just waiting for the first guy who will finish...

I am deeply confident that if the photo editor could have a Client APP that could connect to several "auto updating lightroom catalogues across the local network" and do a quick rating on each, i would not only save me time only working on the shot that he actually wants, but it would save his time because he will be able to start working as soon as we start dumping the cards on the computer.

and also i could ask to my assistant who is back at the office at the other end of the world to start the captioning for me on those, because for now it is impossible to charge customers for a plane ticket for an assistant.

with this system i could come back from the shoot and :

dump the card in the computer applying a "standard minimal caption" (based on an imported template prepared by my photo editor weeks ago on photo mechanics or any other software)

drink an expresso while the selection is being done, and start working on my own edit.

tweak the raw file for good looking on a few major shot , personalize caption on one photo of each different rider and press the "I'm done" button .

my assistant will be able to caption, copy/paste the settings to the rest of the selection, launch the export and the transfer for me.

that would save me 4 to 5 hour of work every day on those events.

I would mind to spend 900$ on that....

and even better, with the increase of bandwidth on WI_FI or 4G, i could send the pictures directly to a watch folder while i am working.

Big newspaper/agency/photographer/website would be amazed by this functionality

being able to remotely live-view , share upload and control the Lightroom catalogue would make the software bigger than ever.

think about this : my work is to shoot photo, every minute that i spend on a computer is less time taking photos... so less time making money to buy software...

lately one of my customers, hired a 17 year old fashionista/geek dude to do Instagram sharing photo with an iPhone... replacing one of the photographer of the team....

we cant just be beaten by this... we need a CONNECTED and SHARABLE software that allow us to get back on whats make us make money : shooting photo !!!!!!

areohbee

Legend

So, should the journal file be excluded from the sync? (along with the previews).

But then, could there be a problem when changed/downloaded catalog is used with old/previous journal file?

Anyway, it would take days (literally) to upload my catalog on my ADSL connection (4GB is .lrcat file alone). The 'A' stands for slow-upload, fast-download.

And it would take could take many hours to upload changes if much work had been done. So, this solution would not work out for me as well as using a local net, e.g. via LightroomStartupScript.

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dtull

Participating Frequently

The first time it'd take a long time (depending on your upstream bandwidth), but I've heard that dropbox.com analyzes changes to files in order to avoid sending whole files when only small portions have changed. I haven't done an experiments to confirm how well this works in practice. I will say that SQLite's internal format is probably quite amenable to such optimizations since changes to it are done in fixed size blocks, so it should be fairly rare for small changes to result in large numbers of blocks needing to be resent.

That's if the 4 GB is just the lrcat file. If 4 GB is the size of the preview cache and lrcat file, then you might be even better off because the preview cache is a pair of SQLite DBs and bunch of fairly small files that are rewritten or discarded atomically, so it should again be amenable to sync'ing.

The biggest risk with such a setup is getting incoherent state of the database files and the ephemeral -journal files during transactions. It would hopefully be rare and brief, but if a -journal were sync'd and accidentally applied to the wrong version of a database file, it would almost certainly corrupt it.

areohbee

Legend

Amy Martz gave detailed instructions for doing that in a post above.

I wonder how long it takes to sync a 4GB catalog via dropbox? (that's the present size of my primary lrcat file).

A

Anonymous

I've found a workflow where I have all the images on a network mounted NAS drive (which LR supports), and then I have the catalogs in a local directory synced with Dropbox. This satisfies LR in respect of having the catalog local, and Dropbox handles syncing between the machines and/or users. You even get online catalog backup for free with that solution.

It does not, however, allow you to work simultaneously on the same catalog, so some kind of manual synchronization between your other users is required ("Hey! I'm using abc catalog right now!"). But if more than one user does use the same catalog simultaneously, Dropbox will just create a conflicted copy, so in principle nothing is lost.

PS! Just remember to disable syncing of the *Previews.lrdata directory, as its not required for sharing the catalog. And it also an idea to mount the NAS on a specific drive, like N: on Windows, to allow the catalog image references to be correct on all machines.

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FeedbackCommunityMember

Inspiring

+1 vote for simultaneous multi-user access to the same NAS-stored catalogue. Even in my small two-person studio, this current handicapped status of LR is terribly frustrating and difficult.

Someone mentioned a need for simultaneous access to the same photo. We don't need that.

However, we do need simultaneous access to the same NAS-stored catalog. While the ability to work on the same event/folder with dynamic record locking of each image would be ideal, even locking individual events/directories to the first user in would be an enormous improvement. THE CURRENT SITUATION IS SO CLUMSY & FRUSTRATING.

All the workarounds and kludges people have posted are just that - KLUDGES.

As a mom & pop wedding photography business up to our eyeballs in images, here's why we need this feature. While I'm editing new work, my wife wants to output earlier work for different audiences, say for vendors or blogs or magazines. From everything I've read, there is no clean way to do this right now. Every solution is a compromised kludge.

IT'S TIME TO ENABLE SIMULTANEOUS MULTI-USER NAS-STORED CATALOGUE ACCESS Adobe.

Thank you.

C

clloff

Participant

My amature photo collection is growing like weeds. I am at 50,000 photos and 600gb and growing. Have all my photos on a secure network drive with RAID1 + 2 extra backups. I have both a PC desktop and a laptop. I like the desktop with the large monitor but truely I use the laptop more and more for photo editing. I am new to lightroom 4. Seems the lightroom catalog can't work on a network drive (error message). Seems teh recommended approach to put a portable drive with teh lightroom catalog and swap back and forth from laptop to PC and then have a separte backup routine for the catalog vs. the library. I am not PC technie. Just I guy who likes to take pictures and is looking for a safe and simple way to manage and edit images. i been using photoshop for years now and always believed it has way more more than most photographers need. I really thought Lightroom was supposed to be with photographers in mind. Seems to me this a a key point that the designers have missed. How do other bounce back and forth between PC and laptop? (maybe I go back to just using Bridge)

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Alex.K.NY

Participating Frequently

"the images themselves can live anywhere"

Indeed. It is a silly situation whereby Lightrooom without any tricks allows raw files and output to be anywhere on the network - but not the catalog.

areohbee

Legend

Fair enough - thanks for the update. Any dmg-mounting-like software available for Windows?

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