Improving our current Lightroom collaborative workflow

Question

We run a sport team and portrait photo business. In our office we have images (jpegs) stored on central NAS drives and each worker has a lightroom catalogue on their local machine that relates to these files. We keep the catalogues in sync in the following manner. Person A may add ratings to the files, once finshed they write meta data to the files and all others are informed to then read metadata from these files. Person B may then make crop, sharpening and tonal adjustments and again write meta data to files and inform the others to read metadata in. This works but is far from ideal and the opportunity for mistakes is high. This is why I am reaching out. I don't think we could use a cloud based lightroom as there are 100-150k files per year (several terrabytes worth). Has anyone tried using lightroom under github? Someone suggested that - never used it. I could try another piece of software but we are reasonably addicted to the LR Barcodes plugin. Especially as we grow the need for more people to be able to work on images even to be able to work from another location would be a huge benefit. Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Is there even other software out there that would do this. If not - Adobe this is also a feature request &#128578;

Conrad_C · Answer

Has anyone tried using lightroom under github? Someone suggested that - never used it.
By @darrellpones

Github is primarily a cloud-based version management system for computer source code. Someone probably suggested it because it is definitely popular for collaborative work…but for programmers. It is mostly cloud-based, but seems to have a local option. But because it was built around the versioned management of computer code and not photographs, my guess is it isn’t the best solution for managing high resolution photo formats and their metadata.

Probably the closest thing Adobe has is Experience Manager, which is a cloud-based digital asset manager optimized for collaboration and very high volumes of images. It seems to be designed primarily for e-commerce websites, so it might not be the best fit for a sport team and portrait business if you are largely print-based. It might still be worth a 5-minute look in case it does have relevant features. But being connected to Creative Cloud, it probably will not have any support for local NASs.

Daminion is another option, but it looks like it is Windows only.

If any of the above sound interesting you should take a closer look at them, because what I wrote above is the extent of what I know. So I might not know about features that they have that would actually help you.

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