P: Multiple catalog syncing

Reading the original question and having just installed Lightroom CC I agree with most comments: there is definitely a compelling need to allow syncing with more than one catalog.

As most comments make the point: I have a travelling Macbook and a big powerful desktop and use generally two catalogs. If I am travelling, I would like to push some photos via syncing to iOS devices. When back, I work on more photos on my desktop and would like to push some of them as well on my iOS devices. Putting one catalog on a NAS drive is not practical as when travelling I will need a local copy.

Call me cynical, but from the point of view of Adobe, allowing only single catalog syncing is an interesting deal. They may think I will put it in their Cloud so that I can access it from both computers. Then the volume will increase and I probably will have to pay extra for more space?. But then, even though I have not tried it, I have reservations as to whether the performances will be good enough. And if travelling to a location where internet access is slow or inexistant, I would still need a local catalog. Merging catalog is a feature I have not yet fully mastered in particular if vertual copies of photos are involved.

So, after this long argument, we definitely need multiple catalog syncing!

I started using multiple catalogs after reading this The Art of Lightroom Catalog Management on Fstoppers

For those reasons, I now have different catalogs and sometime events (resulting in separate catalogs) overlap and of course I would like to send customers links so that they can make their selections.

i am using lr only as an amateur, but use multiple catalogs.

i shoot a lot when travelling and i have a notebook with me so i start out every journey with a fresh catalog. i get up to 10-20k raw images per trip. added to that are timelapses and thousands of gopro joegs.

merging all this into a single catalog is just madness. it becomes impossible to move around on mobile disks or backup into cloud storage. thumbnails/smart previews are all in one gigantic folder eating diskspace like there is no tomorrow.

so i am going to stick to multi catalog.

my main reason for getting lr mobile was rating/sorting on the go, i hoped i could crowdsource the rating and sorting with friends and family. that becomes impossible if i can only have one catalog at a time in mobile.

as for implementation, i think lr mobile should just be able to store multiple catalogs. add one more hierachy level on top. make them visible in the mobile apps? i don't really care. i'd be fine with a warning if my collection names collide and being forced to keep them unique across catalogs.

I also use multiple catalogs in Lightroom. I have over 30,000 photos and maintenance as a single catalog was cumbersome. Load and save times are long, and I had to carry around a dedicated external hard drive to work with that catalog, as it exceeded 500 gb. adobe revel allowed multi catalog support and this should be a feature in Lightroom mobile...I wish adobe revel was still supported.

In addition, Lightroom mobile does not support sharing of albums, only single photos, which is another limitation related to adobe revel.

There's nothing official. However, while you can use Lightroom with multiple catalogues, it works best as a single catalogue, as you see when you examine the features. For example, there is no cross-catalogue searching or other cross-catalogue functions, while multi-catalogue features are designed around the need to move work around computers (eg the Export as Catalag and Import from Another Catalog features).

But LR does allow multiple catalogues, so how do you expect a multi-catalogue LrM to operate? Do you expect a sort of one-to-one relationship, so you'd open catalogue A in LrM, then catalogue B etc? Or do you expect LrM to be a single overarching interface, so the same picture may exist in both a laptop and a desktop catalogue and LrM edits will propagate to each?

Also, rather than claiming there is a real business case scenario (which there may be), it's better to outline what it is.

Thanks for changing this to a feature request - that's effectively what I wanted it to be, but obviously missed that option!

I hear what you are saying about the single-catalog workflow solution, but interestingly in the 3 or so years since I have been using lightroom I have never seen anything official about that, or in any of the marketing/setup instruction etc. Not saying that I went through everything with a fine tooth comb, but my approach to technology has always been to explore the capabilities of a system and see how it can be best adapted to suit the local requirements. So when a feature is provided in software, you would expect that you should realistically be able to use it. I would have thought if they were so adamant about the single catalog workflow issue, then they should have removed the ability to have multiple catalogs in the first place? Why put a feature in there that you are just going to restrict people on down the track.

I say all this with some experience as a software developer for over 20 years, so it's not like I am not aware of the issues and considerations that need to be taken when designing and developing software packages. And I'm not lost on the gap that exists between the design intentions and the end-user usage scenarios that constantly plague developers, but bridging that gap has always been the sign of great software packages.

In fact the main reason I went to the effort of even posting such a question is due to the fact that I have been positively impressed with the shift in responsiveness of Adobe since the rollout of creative cloud and the fact that they can, and often do, react quickly to feature requests and new technologies and implement those changes in a very timely fashion (well in comparison to the historical software lifecycle anyway!)

So I hope other that may be interested in this feature can raise their voices and be heard so that Adobe may look at what they can do to make this happen 🙂

I am not hopeful here, David.

Lightroom was always designed around and recommended as a single-catalog workflow solution. While many people use multiple catalogs and Lightroom can function moderately well in that environ, that isn't its first design criteria. I am changing your question to a feature request to see if others will vote for it.