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

Lightroom Classic version: 8.1 [ 1200465 ]
License: Creative Cloud
Language setting: en
Operating system: Windows 10 - Home Premium Edition
Version: 10.0.17134
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 3.4 GHz
Built-in memory: 12235.6 MB

The 4 bay drive dock is connected via network cable to the back of my desktop system that is the only computer here I'm using.  The other computers here in my house don't get my stuff.  I don't want to share the catalog.  I store the picture files just fine on another physical HD in the drive dock using a different drive letter.  I use M: for the memory/SSD drive, and P: for the physical HD.

This is a different topic because I'm not interested in sharing the catalog on more than one computer and I don't want to use an external drive squeezing through a USB port.  My pictures work just fine on the external HD through the same networked dock because I seldom do anything to the source files themselves.  I would love to be able to keep my previews on the SSD because it would be the rough equivalent of keeping them in memory.  It would let me speed through looking at large numbers of my #150K+ photo collection and weeding out stuff that I only need backups of and not actually hanging around in my catalog and slowing things down.

How is the new drive connected to your computer -- via network (NAS) or a cable (USB, SATA, Thunderbolt)?

As others have pointed out, you can't store LR catalogs on network drives -- that's a fundamental limitation of LR's implementation.

But if the drive is local (internal or attached externally by a cable), then you should absolutely be able to store a catalog on it, regardless of whether it's internal or external.  The operating system (Mac / Windows) may be reporting to LR that the drive is read-only or removable (like a USB stick) -- that happens infrequently for various reasons.

If you copy here the first ten lines of Help > System Info, we can start troubleshooting.

"Lightroom Catalogs can not be opened on network volumes, removable storage, or read only volumes."  Why not?

After buying my new SSD to pop into my drive dock, and copying my catalog/previews files from Lightroom over to it to improve the system performance, I'm advised "NOPE!"  Adobe needs to fix it.  If I am going to continue to lease this software for $120/year then they should make my system handle my 150,000 + images much faster.

I have Lightroom installed on my mac mini. Now I want to use it as well on my Win10 Laptop. Without having the catalog on my QNAP NAS, this is not possible.
Anyway, if QNAP continues developing that quick and Adobe provides no solutions for local installation anymore, I won't use Lightroom anymore.
Cloud service does not provide GigaBit network traffic for affordable prices!

How does symbolic link work with mac?

One thing I don't understand is why LR cannot open a catalog stored on a network share. I use to work locally for the current set of picture, then move all the pictured and related catalog files to a NAS. But if I have to open the catalog again, I have to move it back to the local storage. I understand working from the NAS would be slower, but it would be ok if I have to work on a single picture.

Hi Robert,

The behavior that you describe is expected.

Camera Monochrome profiles (such as those found in the Camera Matching set for your Fuji camera) were designed in such a way that when applied, all color is removed. The B&W Mixer sliders are disabled in this instance because without color data, the mixer has nothing to work with. This is why the “Monochrome profile applied” messaging appears in the UI.

Adobe Monochrome on the other hand, leaves those colors intact by using a different method of conversion under the hood. It was intentionally designed this way so that the B&W Mixer would remain enabled (as were the profiles found in the shipping B&W set). 

If access to the B&W mixer is important to your workflow, you might give the profiles in the default B&W set a try, as they allow far more control (profile amount slider, access to the B&W mixer) than do the legacy Camera Matching profiles. 

Anybody else experiencing the same behavior?

This is similar to how people use Dropbox and similar services to sync catalogs between computers. With any of these approaches, you must be careful to have LR open only one copy of the catalog at a time, or else corruption could occur.

This seems to have been a request that's been out there for some time and technologies have changed in the meantime.  Can I put a suggestion out there?

Synology NAS drives now have a capability called Synology Drive, which lets you set up a local drive on your computer that background syncs to your NAS.  You have a complete local copy of the files and should therefore be able to use that in the regular way.

But, you can sync that NAS content to another Synology Drive location an a different computer.  So you have three copies on computers and the NAS, and The Drive software keeps them all in sync, and has versioning.  You could add a third and a ......

I haven't tried this with LR but I have other apps that function this way