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FabulousFriday
Participant
June 21, 2023
Question

Best workflow and setup for sharing photos on 3 workstations + mobile

  • June 21, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 348 views

What would be the best option to make all my photos available on 3 different stations as well as on mobile and iPad? I use a Mac Studio as my primary workstation at my studio. A PC at my studio at home and a Macbook Pro when I'm traveling. I also sometimes edit photos on my iPhone or Ipad. I would like to have all my photos available no matter where I log in and ensure my catalogs still are in sync.

I currently take about 100.000 photos/year and I expect this to grow 150-200% in the coming year. I like Dropbox for photo storage as it could (backup) as well as the 3TB storage, but could switch to Adobe storage if that would be more beneficial. I work RAW if that makes a difference with Lightroom Classic and Photoshop as my main 2 edit suites. 

A typical and perfect scenario would be for me to do a shoot, and arrive at my studio. Load memory card into my Mac Studio and upload to my storage. When done, go home and there I can open up the new photos and start to edit. If not done, I can just pick up where I left off when I get to the office or when I open my Laptop while traveling. 

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    1 reply

    JohanElzenga
    Community Expert
    JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 21, 2023

    Quite frankly I think this would be next to impossible with Lightroom Classic. You can only activate Lightroom Classic on two computers (you can install it on three, but you would constantly have to activate/deactivate one of the three) and catalog management would be a problem. First of all you'd need to sync the catalog between these three computers. You can do this via Dropbox, but there have been a lot of problems lately. You also want to have access to the images on your mobile devices, but you can only sync one single catalog to the cloud. That may further complicate things (although a Dropbox-synced catalog should be seen as one single catalog).

     

    I think it would make more sense to use Lightroom desktop for this. If I'm not mistaken, then a subscription to Lightroom taken from the Apple App Store (so not directly from Adobe!) allows you to have Lightroom desktop on up to five computers, not on just two again. Mobile devices are always as many as you want. The only problem is that cloud storage will become costly at the current Lightroom plan prices and your rate of production...

     

    -- Johan W. Elzenga
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      FabulousFridayAuthor
      Participant
      June 21, 2023

      Thank you m8 for your swift and insightful answer. Would it make any difference if I skip one station and only stick with 2? I would rather not leave Classic. I both do tutorials on my YouTube channel, but mostly I've been using it since day 1 and I got so many presets, brushes, etc, that I'm not sure I'm ready for such a big change switching out Lightroom Classic to Lightroom. Might be worth it somehow. Clients pay for storage, so if it's not outrages I could prob manage that without too much of a hassle. 

       

      JohanElzenga
      Community Expert
      JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      June 21, 2023

      It does make a difference, but you are still facing the challenge to sync the catalog between the two Lightroom Classic computers. People have done that successfully using Dropbox in the past, but Dropbox changed the way it works recently as a result of new requirements that Apple imposed in MacOS Ventura and since then I have seem a lot of trouble reports. The safest way to 'sync' is using an external disk with the catalog on it, and connect that disk to the computer you want to work on, but I don't know if that is a workable solution in your case. The images are less of a problem, because you could generate smart previews so you can work with the images even when the originals are offline.

       

      -- Johan W. Elzenga
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