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

Lightroom needs to support a shared catalog over a network to make it friendly to professional and multiple users. Copying the catalog from machine to machine is not only time consuming but it destroys the edits made it the develop module. Until Lightroom can support multiple users connecting to a shared catalog on a network drive it is really nothing more than a cataloging application for professional users.

If I find a new application that will match lightroom but give me the network option, I will drop adobe so fast they won't be able to put the plug in before everything washes down the drain.

Thank you Dan. I think that helps.

While I can't speak for when or how this turns into an actual Lightroom feature, I can say that the team is acutely aware of the constraints and awkwardness of multi machine (and device) workflows for Lightroom.

Honestly, providing a better answer to multi-machine (and now device) workflows been in the running for every version of Lightroom so far and has just tended to get pushed aside by other features. That said, (and to be clear here this isn't my call, so this isn't any kind of promise or claim about what will or won't be in the next version, so don't go reading it as such), I've pointed to this thread on more than one occasion to promote my position that this feature's time is (over)due. :o)

Note that even if I did know what is or isn't going to be in the next version (and I honestly don't), I couldn't tell you here anyway, so the only reason I say this is to make it eminently clear that (a) we are watching this thread and (b) we're not satisfied with the existing multi machine workflow options either. Most of the team are active users of the product and want many of the same things you all do.

It looks like you can treat an image just like a word document. Getting someone else to import and open a particular raw file on a shared storage device with their copy of Lightroom does work and opens the associated XMP so they they can edit the file (assuming that you have LR writing XMP files). What we cannot do is share collections, keywords, flagging and rating. Sharing the catalog would be much nicer, there is no doubt of that: keywords, ratings and I suspect virtual copies would be available too, but the simplest form of sharing, the kind that we do with Word documents, looks like it works.

Greg,

I work on single user documents shared on a network resource all the time. That is all many of us want. I don't want two people editing a photo at once. I bet there are requests for that, but for the most part, we are looking for a shared catalog. Editing would still be done as a single user.

Your example of a word doc is right on. We share them on a network, edit them locally off the network, and others can use it too. Why can't we do that as seamlessly in LR?

I'm not disagreeing with you that it would be nice. It would just be a different product and I've suggested both how I think they might be approaching it.

Having worked with a multi-user text editor, I can tell you that it is possible and it does save all that having to copy documents or fragments of documents around (in much the same way that people sometimes say they want to share photos in Lightroom) but as a piece of software it was a fair bit more complex than just whacking a copy of Word on a desktop machine.

Photos can be located on shared storage for your partner to look at, its only the catalog that needs to be local. I suspect that photos can be in two catalogs at the same time with the photo and XMP sidecars on shared storage (its an experiment I will get around to in the next couple of weeks: virtual copies would be invisible, it will be interesting to see how that turns out).

There have been comments from Adobe staff about the issues and complexity involved in this and references to experiments done in the past, so they have said that they have been looking at it. If it were as simple as people keep saying I suspect we would have it now.

A word processor is indeed a single-user application. But that is dictated by the type of work being done. When Word users work collaboratively the normal workflow involves sending the file to others via email for review and comment. At the end of that workflow, the owner of the file merges the comments to produce the final document.

Lightroom is right now a single-user implementation only because that is the way Adobe implemented it. The problem is that two or more people cannot work with the same catalog concurrently. If I want my partner to look at a photo or set of photos, I have to physically move the external drive to her computer. Then while she is working, I have no access to the catalog! Although editing a photo is a single-user function, using the catalog is not. What is needed is for the catalog to be make multi-user so we can both work concurrently. For Adobe, that means that they will need to implement some sort of record-level locking so that two or more users don't concurrently try to change the same file. But that's not so hard if a decent database underlies the application. It's been done for decades.

I think the comparision to a word processor is invalid. Lightroom is better compared to a database. The information stored in Lightroom are data about each image in that catalog. The original photos are linked to by Lightroom but the photos themselves are not contained within the catalog. Users generally only work on one photo at a time, so some sort of record-level locking could be used to ensure there is no conflict which would result when two people both tried to change the same record.

Since I'm not privy to Adobe's internals, I don't know whether a shared catalog version of Lightroom would then become much more memory intensive. I suspect that the additional overhead is manageable. That is an issue Adobe would have to evaluate when determining whether or not to do this. But there are lots of other database systems out there that work quite well on client workstations with "normal" memory. In any case, the whole hardware environment is shifting over to 64-bit systems (my desktops are 64-bit, and it is great that Adobe produces 64-bit applications that can use my available memory.)

I don't care how they do, it. I do care about support for networking the application. AND I maintain that this is needed by home users as well as photogratphic professionals who work with more than one person. How they decide to price it is their choice...but I sure hope they don't decide to jack up the price significantly.

You interpret my comments to mean that I'm asking for Adobe to give a committment to spending _unlimited_ time and money to give us what we want. All I'm asking is that Adobe commit to evaluating the problem and then to tell us whether it is likely to be done or not and in what timeframe. When I said "no matter how long it takes" I meant that I recognize this might take a while to achieve. I didn't mean they should not be fiscally responsible.

Rodney,
What Adobe have said is that it is hard, and it is. Lightroom is a single user application, like MS Word is, and getting to a multi-user configuration involves architectural changes that would either make it MUCH more resource hungry (adding a multi-user database engine would make the memory usage go up sharply) or require them to produce a separate high-end application that in all probability would be relatively expensive. It looks like they are approaching this problem through Revel/Carousel, and we might talk about whether this is the right way to do it, my own view is that it is probably not, but that's a different conversation.

Your second paragraph seems to be complaining that Adobe have not given a commitment to spend unlimited time and money on giving you what you want. It seems unlikely that you will get that.

Excellent comment and directly to the point of this discussion.

The bottom line is that customers need a truly multi-user Lightroom that work over home and professional networks. Properly implemented, more than one person could concurrently access the database...that's what it is at its heart...while maintaining integrity using record-level locking. And customers in this case mean everyone from professional photographers in work groups to small business and family networks.

The only problem I see is that Adobe so far has given excuses as to why it would be difficult to achieve...but has left no hint that they really have decided to do so no matter how long it takes.