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

I too would like to see some form of shared capability with LR4. While the product itself is awesome, I still feel gimped in that in order for My wife, daughter and I to centrally store images in a unified catalog, I have had to build a separate machine to manage everything. While one employee of Adobe indicated that there is the ability to put everything on an external drive, that seems archaic in today's world. Most households maintain more then a couple of computers, most have a desktop, laptop + tablet.

This kind of integration would be a great leap forward in functionality for a lot of people and I would personally be willing to purchase it as a premium update.

You should read the comments here. A bit of searching would have saved you some anguish.

Lightroom 4 cannot access catalogues saved on a network! Our university catalog needs to be on a network so that the photographer and his assistants can access the SAME catalog. SOLUTIONS?! We need one fast.

My concern is that Adobe shows no signs at all of recognizing the problem or working on a solution...not even a "We do intend to provide these capabilities in a future version."

It seems to me that the solution will require porting the application to a new software platform. MySQL is available out there in the public domain. Yes, such a conversion would require a lot of work on the part of Adobe and/or a selected contractor to them. Money, yes...time, yes. But if they don't commit to start this project, we'll still be talking about this need a decade from now. It has been 2 years + since I submitted my official requests on this and I was far from the first. This product will die on the vine if it is not updated to run based on a modern programming platform that already includes this capability.

But frankly, I'm getting weary with the waiting and lack of responsiveness from Adobe. Maybe a competitor will recognize the opportunity.

Is there anyone in Adobe who cares about Lightroom users?

Except Brett's response doesn't address the problem.

The requirement is to allow multiple people on multiple computers to edit images from the same catalog at the same time (not necessarily the same image).

At best, Brett's suggestion allows editing of the same catalog at different times.

I think one important use case is the one user, multiple workstations over network.

When you do have multiple workstations (license allows 2), the workflow Adobe wants you to use is to haul an external HDD and its PSU across these workstations. This is very tedious and prune to data loss!

Such external HDD needs to be backed up regularely. To my experience this HDD is backed up too seldom since it needs to be manually connected to the workstations.

These workstations already has a Gb network with a central NAS which in turn backs up its contents offsite. Today the LR backup is made manually from the external HDD to the NAS. When remembered.

I don't mind much about simultaneous access to LR, but I think its a major drawback that you can't store the catalog directly on the NAS even with one client. If I could store the catalog directly, it would be stored in a reliable storage with proper backup compared to the external HDD.

For the photographer/consumer orientated it would be great to have the capabilities to take a subset of records on a portable device and then be able to synch up changes from the portable records to a centralized catalog whether it is stored on a local computer, portable hard disk, or a network drive - with access to the central repository for one user at a time. For now I'd be happy with being able to store and use a catalog from a hard wired network storage device.

Adobe has their work cut out for them! There seems to be several categories of access people are asking for from simple storage and access to a shared repository, syncing a portable catalog back to a central repository, to multi-users on a shared repository; to a multi-user, multiple access rights, connected to a centralized repository.

I do not think some people understand what they are asking for. There are already several great multi-user professional and enterprise digital asset management solutions available and I think many would be surprised at the cost of these.

My setup consists of a desktop machine, a laptop, and a QNAP network attached storage. The network is a gigabit network and I use two gigabit links, teamed, on both the network attached storage box and the desktop machine. Other than remote work / initial import, all the raw files and developed/processed output, lives on that network attached drive under the wing of hardware RAID.

I work on a desktop machine while at the studio and laptop while away. Laptop is often used to make adjustments on site with a client, and also sometimes to make use of time while on the road to import and apply metadata and initial presets / generate previews / etc.

I currently have to awkwardly copy things around. I would love Lightroom to natively support the concept of "taking a catalog on the road" and synching changes afterwards. As well as the notion of importing new content for an existing NAS-hosted catalog (or a whole new catalog).

For me it's not a multi-user problem or any manner of concurrent access problem. I just want to maintain a similar level of storage flexibility and portability for my Adobe catalogs as any other files (or indeed databases like MySQL) - which do not care if they are on a local drive or network share - or even backed up on optical media.

Instead of going around with an external hard drive and having all of the problems of making sure all your copies of Lightroom are set up in the same way etc., why not just connect to your central PC using Teamviewer (or the equivalent?).

I do this all the time - I have one copy of Lightroom on a central PC with the catalog and all the images and I connect to it from any other PC or from my laptop using Teamviewer. It works perfectly.

When I'm on location I connect using Teamviewer over the web ... and as long as the broadband connection is reasonable it's as good as sitting at the central PC. And you can do all the development you want, go into Photoshop if necessary, and print, email etc., as though you were in the office.

Admittedly this is one-user-at-a-time, but it's better than lugging external drives with all of the attendant problems.

I really want to work with Lightroom on a network, I work from a laptop and a desktop, depending on where I am.

In todays world I do not see why Adobe have not included this - I for one will not be buying Lr4 after my trail runs out.

I currently use Aperture on my laptop (Mac), and my desktop is a PC so I dont get to work on the same photos - so using Lr seemed the better idea, shame it doesnt let me do so easily as it is better than Aperture in a lot of ways.

Could a plug in be made to create a work around for making it work locally and uploading to a master networked catalog?