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

Mounted dmg has worked for me since version 1. I've probably accessed it thousands of times without corruption. Always over Cat6 GigE and a good industrial grade switch though. Latency is not an issue with a good hd on both ends. In fact, hd access can be faster than local when working of a networked macpro raid with gigE. Close to 90MB/sec sustained in duplex.

the images themselves can live anywhere

best,
walker

Up to Lightroom 3.5 you could do this on Windows and Lightroom would be none the wiser, but now it sees through the mapping that underlying the drive letter is NAS.

There are plenty of databases (incl. mission critical) and file systems that work with NAS quickly and efficiently, and some SOHO / enterprise NAS such as those by QNAP enable you to connect two gigabit connections for double the throughput. This isn't some dinky "harddrive inside a wifi router with storage" NAS. It can keep up with the CPU doing image processing.

I feel rather foolish - I managed to mount the drive in the usual way - what confused me is that I thought Lightroom would not see the drive over the network, but it has, and now able to see the catalog on both of my machines. Thanks everyone for all your help.

Reminder: on Windows, one can just map the network drive with catalog as local drive. *but* those who've done that said:

* it's slower (for the multitudes of random catalog accesses)
* it's less reliable (potential for corrupted catalog, even when only used by one user at a time).

I assume the same will be true of mounted dmg.

Don't get me wrong: if this works well enough for you, then more power to ya. But, keep your catalog backed up...

There is a reason why Adobe doesn't support this configuration (they are aware of it, Dan Tull of Adobe said so). Again, the purpose of my post is not to throw water on this idea, or overturn said apple cart, just be aware of potential for less than ideal behavior, and be prepared for it...

Rob

fixed: http://theagnosticprint.org/how-to-ne...

fixed: http://theagnosticprint.org/how-to-ne...

Thanks very much for your suggestion, I think it is great. In the process of syncing my two machines and wondered if you could help me. I am rather embarrassed to ask what is meant by “mount the drive with your images” This is mentioned in paragraph no 4. Please could you spell it out to me.

Regards

Brett, while the name matches the letter of what Kenny wrote, the point of his comment, is that we ALL need a SOLUTION for Lightroom catalogs stored on the network

We already have a product called Adobe Drive: http://www.adobe.com/products/adobedr...

It's not designed to work with Lightroom as it works with Version Cue servers, which in turn work with Creative Suite product. It is doubtful that Lightroom would recognize Adobe Drive as a viable location to store a catalog file, but I've never worked with it myself.

I've been waiting for a solution for multi-user and NAS solution for well over 2 years.... Sounds like an "Adobe Drive" (i.e. google drive, sky drive, dropbox) might be a solution... in addition to NAS storage of course.

The train is stopped... let's get this feature done and get out of the station! There are photos to be shared people! 🙂