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

It seems to me that lots of reasons have been given for why a multiuser version has not been accomplished in the past. That said, a rebuild of Lightroom to make it multi-user would move Lightroom from a niche to a major consideration for small to large organizations where data synchronization are essential for any organization wide solutions. I think Adobe should consider how this will improve its competitive postion in the market and go for this major increase in functionality.

So, is the bottom line that Adobe is not currently considering creating a multi-user version of Lightroom? Or is it under consideration for a future version?

It worked for me, however the performance was not very good. In the end I decided to keep the library on my notebook since that is where I do all of the editing, and to only keep the actual photos on the server. This also meant that the thumbnails are not stored on the server but on the laptop, and that made a huge difference. However I am using WiFi, so that is probably the reason why it is so slow over the network.

I don't have a need for a multi-user catalog, but a multi-computer catalog would sure be handy. Sometimes I want to do some quick edits while sitting in the family room with my laptop. For more serious editing sessions, though, I'll be on my desktop. It would be nice to have the same files, and the same catalog, accessible from both.

Jay,

Good point to consider for the Multi-user use case. Even then especially when you are edting most of the your work is going to be local to the client system you are on. You really don't want to have the client constantly updating the previews for every edit. That's what I was thinking about.

To your point there should be a way to "release" work back to the server that would also update the server previews so that additional clients would not have to re-render finished work just to browse the image database.

Totally agree with that... it's much more about being able to seamlessly switch computers. I've managed this by using synctoy between PC's but that always made me nervous. I'm trying to see if I can get a dropbox based solution to do the trick.

Anyway, a fully integration "move everything to laptop" button would be great.

Exactly! I don't need a multi-user-environment but just an easier way of synching my catalogue between desktop and laptop computer. Right now, the only way I can do this is: Before I take my laptop somewhere, I synch my LR catalogue from my desktop to my laptop so it matches it exactly. Then I can work with LR on my laptop. After that, I sync my laptop's catalogue back to my desktop and continue to work there. So, every time I switch computers, I need to sync my catalogue.
It would just be so much easier, if there was a sync feature in Lightroom that would allow to sync and contribute in both directions (let's say, for example by keeping always the most recent edits of both machines).

Cheers,

Timo

"In either case you should probably treat the previews more like cache than "data". They are being regenerated all the time anyway as you make edits so it make sense to me that my previews would always be localized to my local computer user workspace. "

Since the previews can be dozens or hundreds of gigabytes and since they could easily represent tens or hundreds of hours of CPU rendering time, this might not be all that practical for a "client" system.

Thanks Dan for clarifying some of the issues involved.

It occurs to me that this topic probably could be split in two separate but related discussions.

1. Multi-user - Two or more people working on a shared catalog and image database. This requires a client-server architecture with the necessary file locking etc. This is not the common use model but would be highly desired by anyone with a small studio and one or more assistances up to an organization managing a large archive.

2. Multi-computer - One person working with one or more catalogs. I think that today this covers a large majority of Lightroom users. Many of us regularly use a lap top computer in the field to start working on the days images and then want to have a say to simply merge this back into or main catalog on the desktop at home.

In either case you should probably treat the previews more like cache than "data". They are being regenerated all the time anyway as you make edits so it make sense to me that my previews would always be localized to my local computer user workspace.

-louie

If we were to create a multi-user system for Lightroom, the database would be unlikely to be the exposed interface anyway. The exposed layer would probably be at a higher level than that (web service-like, regardless of the protocol particulars).

Note that even a multi-user MySQL installation doesn't just put a file on a network share and let file locking manage concurrent access. It has a network daemon and clients connect on a TCP port to make queries and get data.

So SQLite isn't the reason we don't have a multi-user system, it's the reason we don't do multi-user by just putting the catalog files on a network share.

Besides, multi-user Lightroom isn't just about the catalog data. There's previews, the original image files (neither of these are in the lrcat file), and lots of other pieces that would have to be managed as well.

If the task of making Lightroom a multi-user, multi-machine system is a book, the SQLite versus MySQL part is a footnote. Ok, maybe a short chapter. 🙂