Can I move the Lightroom Catalog from one location to another?

I am a Lightroom Newbie so please be gentle :-).

What is the problem with moving the catalog to a networked drive?

Presently all of my photos (>100,000 of 'em) reside on a networked storage machine (othrewise known as the Big Honkin' Server) which is backed up (both locally and off site) daily. Because my photographic workflow is performed on a workstation, I use a gigabit network (measured throughput of ~650 Mbps) and even though I am working on photos over the network, I find the performance is quite snappy. While my workstation is robust in terms of processors and ram, it only has a small hard drive and the hard drive is only backed up when the configuration changes. All data and user settings are stored on the server.

Because Lightroom 3 will not let me move the catalog to a network machine, it does not seem to play nicely with my existing system. The only thing I can think of doing is to back up the catalog to the server at least daily. This seems to be a clunky workaround.

Does anyone know how large the catalog file gets to be? This is another concern because of the small drive on my workstation. I have asked this question of several people (including a call to Lightroom support) and I can't seem to get an answer.

How do folks use Lightroom on the same catalog of photos with both desktop machines and laptops?

I would appreciate any advice the community can give me.

Jim

I've read that it is better to have the Catalog at the same location to avoid disconnected images, which sounds reasonable.

You may have read this somewhere, but it is completely untrue. Moving your catalog to the same location as your images does nothing to help you avoid disconnected images. Therefore, in my opinion, this is not a good reason for you to move the catalog file. It is simply unnecessary work.

One way to avoid disconnected images is to use Lightroom (not Windows or Mac Finder) when you want to move or rename your photos or folders.

For better performance it is preferable to have the catalog located on an internal hard drive. By default the catalog and the preview files have to be located in the same folder since there is continual read/write taking place while working in Lightroom. Lightroom does not make any changes to the original files so its fine for them to be located on another hard drive internal or external. Lightroom loves lots of hard disk space to operate so if your catalog is on an internal drive make sure it not starved for disk space.

However its ok for your catalog/previews files to reside on an external HDD with your original photo files.

Your photo files can reside on a HDD conected to a network but your catalog and preview files cannot be located on a network.

e.g I have my catalog / previews on the main HDD with my operating system with over 50% free disk space. My Photo files are on a secondary internal HDD with over 75% free disk space. I back up to external HDD.

Mahombi,

Moving a catalog to another location (also to an external drive as long as it's not a network drive) is no problem at all. Just move the *.lrcat file as well as the *.lrdata folder and double-click it from the new location to open it. Moving the *.lrcata folder also makes a new build up of the previews unnecessary at the new location.

Whether you really want to have your catalog on an external drive is another question. External drives might have a slower speed than internal drives, which affects your work in LR somewhat. Also, having the catalog in the same location as the images themselves is not necessary at all and actually does not help not having disconnected images. If you handle them correctly, your images stay connected, if you don't, having the catalog in the same location will not help a lot.

It is of utmost importance to backup the catalog on a regular basis, and doing this if possible to a different volume than where the catalog itself resides on (e.g. external drive).

Beat Gossweiler

Switzerland