Lightroom Classic catalogue synced across 2x Mac’s

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
November 2, 2025
1 reply
123 views

Hi guys

I use 2x Macs, syncing to the exact same Synology Drive folder on my NAS.
This is about having the same Lighteoom catalogue available on both Macs. I only use Lightroom on one mac at a time.

Is this good practice or advised against?

So each mac has Synology Drive client installed, syncing to the exact same folder on my NAS. That will be 3x copies of the same folder / lightroom catalogue.

1, Mac1

2, Mac2

3, NAS Home Drive

Each Mac to sync to the same Home Drive.

Do you reccomend this practice of syncing a catalogue and use one catalogue on 2x computers?

macOS

dj_paige

Legend

Putting a LrC catalog on a networked drive is not possible, it will not open and it will provide an error message that says you can't put catalog files on a network drive.

C

Chris29984680mm03Author

Participant

Hi DJ

thx for the reply.

The catalogue is only backed up and synced to and from the network drive.

It really lives on each Mac, and will sync changes to the Mac and then to the network drive.
Yhat will prompt a sync to the second Mac to have the updated / most recent catalogue synced to it for use later.

Hope this helps

dj_paige

Legend

The catalogue is only backed up and synced to and from the network drive. The catalogue is only backed up and synced to and from the network drive.

If I am understanding you properly, it is NOT backed up at all. You keep copying/overwriting the copy on the network drive to contain the latest changes to the catalog regardless of whether the changes were on Mac 1 or Mac 2. A backup would be a static copy of a file that doesn't ever change and doesn't ever get used for any purpose except in the unfortunate circumstance the original file is damaged or lost. Your plan makes me extremely nervous, if the file gets corrupted for some reason, and you don't realize it, you could overwrite the "good" copies of the catalog on Mac 1 or Mac 2 not realizing the catalog is corrupted, and now you have zero copies of your "good" catalog.

Yhat will prompt a sync to the second Mac to have the updated / most recent catalogue synced to it for use later.

Nothing in LrC causes catalogs to be synched across two computers. You would have to do this "manually" or via some third party software. But as I said, I don't like this plan at all.

If you made static backup copies of the current catalog via some method, then I would feel better about it. On my computer, I have about 4 weeks of daily backups of my catalog file, and also cloud copies of my catalog file.

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