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

I have what seems to me to be a simple request. I am a photographer. I maintain an on-line shop, through which I sell prints of my images and some specialty products using my images. I use two (2) computers - a 27" iMac and a 15" MacBook Pro. I work on content for my website primarily from the iMac, but there are times when I would like to do work via my laptop from another room. This involves the expenditure of considerable time spent copying catalogs back and forth so as to be working on the correct version of the catalog (s). My catalogs are stored on an external hard drive. It would be far simpler and far less time consuming were I able to simply access my external drive via wifi with my laptop. But LR Classic refuses to do this. Can you please write the software to allow network access?

On my Windows 10 Laptop Photoshop does not work properly unless i run it in administrator mode. Since i regulary load pictures there from Lightroom, i had to put lightroom in administrator mode as well. When in administrator mode, Lightroom won't acces the pictures on my NAS server. It shows the server as offline. There are no error messages and Lightroom does show the pictures, but only the previeuws. When i open Lightroom normally it works fine. Only then i have problems loading them in photoshop. Is there something i can do so i can acces my NAS when i am in administration mode?

When importing large numbers of images (4000+)  from a folder structure on Synology NAS, Lightroom import stalls at somewhere past 90% on the progress bar. Same thing happens on Windows 10 and OSX High Sierra. Lightroom still appears active and is using 100%+ CPU on Macbook, 30%+ CPU on Windows 10

 Have disabled spindump and tailspind on Mac to avoid deadly embrace when Lightroom uses a lot of CPU, so it's not that.

If I stop the import and try either import again or synchronize folder, it may add a few more images before stalling again. I don't think it is a particular image, because it happens on more than one source folder structure.

By way of example - I have a folder with multiple subfolders and around 7k images.




The screenshot shows the Lightroom data for the folder after import and for Adobe Bridge.

The Adobe Bridge data matches the output of a shell script query to find the numbers of each type of files. Lightroom thinks there are 1035 RAW files and 4369 JPEGs - adding the 1483 shown in the Lightroom Synchronise dialogue above would give 5852, which is close to the (correct) Bridge JPG count. However, if I click Synchronise, Lightroom shows a wait cursor for a while and then shows 0 files to import.

 "Ignore suspect duplicates" in import is disabled and "treat JPEGs next to Raw Files as separate photos" is ticked in Lightroom preferences. (I get the same result if I try an Import/Add as I do if I try the synchronise.)

I get this on both Windows 10 PC and on Mac, although the import numbers on the PC differ slightly from the Mac, (PC finds 5508 images on the same folder structure as opposed to 5511, but also shows 1483 to be imported to synchronise).

I get this behaviour on a range of folder structures on the Synology.


I have tried selecting images, dragging and dropping from Bridge on the Lightroom import dialog and provided you do it a folder at a time, selecting images, Lightroom gets all the images. If you drag and drop a folder it goes back to the Lightroom image retrieval behaviour with stalling and missed images. This use of Bridge, may seem to offer a short-term workaround, but when working with many tens of thousands of images, as I am, in complex folder structures, it's not really a workable proposition.

I can see that this type of request has been floating out here for about 6+ years already.  Ideally I'd like for Lightroom catalog to be simultaneously shared and multi-user, however as a developer I understand the complications of that sort of implementation.

Alternatively, I would just like to be able to store a Lightroom catalog on a network share that allows only one user at a time to access it.  This could be implemented through a locking mechanism that allows only one instance of LR to access the catalog at a time.

This would be a vast improvement over the current implementation and would likely satisfy many, many of the requests for some sort of a shared catalog concept.

See this bug report, Library collection panel scrolls unexpectedly when you duplicate/rename/delete a collection set, for similar symptoms.   I haven't merged this into that topic because it's not clear it's the same bug.

A feature many people would like to have is the ability to work from a Network drive. 

Presently, Lightroom can read and write files on a network drive (for example, network attached storage). Although, we cannot save the catalog file to the NAS and work remotely from a different computer.

Here's a work around for your problem: select the collections from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

You might like this idea I proposed for a better way to organize folders and collections:
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/module-suggestion-organize

Hello I have solved this problem by creating symbolic links to my NAS drive. You can read how to create it here https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

Just put path to your photos and catalogue files into a batch file and run as administrator - here is mine

mklink /D C:\Pictures\Lightroom \\your nas adress\pictures\Lightroom
mklink /D C:\Pictures\Autoimport \\your nas adress\pictures\Autoimport
mklink /D C:\Pictures\2016 \\your nas adress\pictures\2016
mklink /D C:\Pictures\2017 \\your nas adress\pictures\2017


Works great on 1Gbps network same as from local drive!

You cannot use windows picture folder in your user folder - if you open in on another pc the path will be different, you have to move it directly to c:\ or other drive.

Hope it helps
Regards from Czech rep
Mirek

Lightroom catalog cannot be opened and managed when stored on NAS. I really wish Adobe would allow the use of Network Assigned Storage as on option.