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gb3arts
Participant
December 11, 2013
Answered

Sync LR Catalog between 2 computers but not master files

  • December 11, 2013
  • 13 replies
  • 103628 views

I have LR5 on my main iMac desktop system and on my Macbook Air.

The iMac is connected to a disk array which stores my master photo files.

I would like to sync this catalog (iMac master) with the Macbook Air and only be looking at previews on the Air,

so that I can choose selects on the road.

I would come back to the iMac to work with the master files.

Is this possible and easy? I'm not interested in having my files live in a cloud or cloud based sharing or anything like that.

Just Catalog with previews on the Air which sync to Catalog on the iMac.

Thank you,

Greg

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer phillydave

    My new workflow involves my Mac and MacBook Pro, as well. Expanding on what Michael said, I put my working catalog on my DropBox folder that I synchronize between my two computers. I'll load my images on my Mac and generate smart previews. When I load that catalog from DropBox on my MacBook, I get the smart previews with the catalog so I can pick, keyword, and even post process. When I go back to my Mac where the original images are, I can open up Lightroom, see all my edits and such, and then finish up and export my processed images.

    Any synchronizing technology (DropBox, CC, Google Drive, custom solution) will work. You basically just want that catalog to be sychronized between multiple computers. It's magic. The only caveat is that if you're fast switching between the two computers and both machines are trying to edit, you'll get conflicts. But my workflow rarely does that, and I just make sure DropBox finishes its deal on one computer before I open Lightroom on the other.

    13 replies

    M
    markp71750915
    Participant
    December 12, 2016

    Hi

    if any one is interested I made a little script that you can use to sync the catalog between two pc's.

    Minimal changes are required to get yours working.

    Just to be safe make a backup of your catalog before you attempt to run it.

    It is Microsoft OS only.

    Just extract to your external, read the small manual I made "SETUP HELP.txt", edit the top peace of "LIGHTROOM SYNC.BAT"  and you should be in business.

    Let me know what you think.

    Dropbox - catalog backup proc.zip

    ManiacJoe
    ManiacJoe
    Inspiring
    December 12, 2016

    Nice script.

    You might toss in a check for the .lock file with the catalog. If it exists, Lightroom did not shutdown correctly. If there are resulting catalog problems, you may not want to overwrite the old backup until any potential problems are resolved.

    endusone
    endusone
    Participating Frequently
    December 7, 2016

    OK!  A few more days of testing and I have a solution!

    Export/Import Catalog - Works well and imports edits.  Not perfect for me because I want the photoshop files to sit next to the raw files in the same folder without having to move them manually.  I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me Lightroom was doing this and I'm just a big dummy, but either way.

    Resilio - Resilio works extremely well but you really have to give it time to sync when you first set it up.  It will seem like its synced fairly soon, even if you open LR, but it's not.  Once you get that initial sync done, though, it really works very well.

    My solution: I shrank the partition on my laptop and created a new partition (X:) which corresponds to the drive on my desktop (and server for that matter) where the files live.  I configured Resilio to share the files on the drive.  The server pulls down all of the files.  I configured the laptop to selectively sync files, and went through and enabled sync on all the necessary catalog files.

    From there, I can work on whatever has smart previews generated for it.  If I want to work on the full raw files, I just go to the folder or folder tree that contains them on the laptop, right click, and tell it to sync to this device.  I do my edits, generate my tiffs from photoshop if need be, etc.  The files get synced to both the server and the desktop.  When I want to remove the files I just tell resilio to remove the files from this device and they will still be on the server and desktop.  If I want to sync them again I just reenable.

    Need to be careful that things finish syncing before opening LR on the desktop, but I am going to be doing a lot more editing on the go.  I should be able to import files from cards on the go and have them sync back to my desktop and server too, obviously with some limitations based on how fast my connection is.

      E
      ellanosv
      Participant
      July 27, 2016

      I solved how to synchronize two lightroom catalogs on (of course) two different macs, method is here: A couple of things I noticed: How to synchronize two Lightroom catalogs , questions, comments and/or suggestions are welcomed.

      J
      Community Expert
      Jao vdLCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      June 4, 2016

      In my opinion the least dangerous way (i.e. possible catalog corruption if you forget to quit out of one machine or open the other before cloud syncing has occurred) and the cheapest and fastest way is to use a big USB stick or SSD drive (they are tiny and superfast - you can get 256GB USB 3 sticks for $50!) to store the catalog and previews and simply move that between machines. 

        A
        Anonymous
        March 29, 2016

        I have a huge catalog of 40k pictures, is there a way to create a smaller catalog and add to dropbox for the project i work on currently and then merge them?

        ManiacJoe
        ManiacJoe
        Inspiring
        March 30, 2016

        You can create a new catalog by selecting your desired photos in the Library module then doing an "export as catalog".

        Later you can do an "import from catalog" to merge the two back together.

        splint
        splint
        Participant
        June 3, 2016

        Thanks for this great discussion, very helpful. Has anyone successfully replicated the above approach using Microsoft OneDrive? It has a facility to selectively synch, but when I uncheck the previews folder, it warns that all local content in that folder will get deleted. So am I correct in thinking that Dropbox works slightly differently to that? Cheers, Nige

        A
        Anonymous
        March 27, 2016

        http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/sync-other-folders

        You can try this link for syncing forlders and files into your Dropbox folder easier, for both Mac and Windows.

        mva_
        mva_
        Participating Frequently
        February 17, 2016

        Does anyone have experience to do the same with Bittorrent Sync?

        I think it does partial updates.

        With synced catalogs will both imac and macbook Lightroom installations point to the same photo locations on the NAS?

        I want to use both macbook and imac with the same catalog and same picture folder on NAS. So the catalog points to the pictures on the NAS from the Imac with previews etc. And then I sync this catalog with previews to the macbook. I have very little storage space on the macbook and the Imac is not always turned on.

        Thank in advance,

        V
        vlassov
        Participant
        April 28, 2015

        Is anyone using Adobe CC for this instead of DropBox? Are there any benefits?

        I use dropbox for a lot of things, but was thinking of using the CC storage just for images. Any thoughts?

        The other option I guess is Google Drive, which is better in terms of sharing files on a smartphone.

        P
        Playful_Dragonfly1549
        Participating Frequently
        April 28, 2015

        It seems that CC-cloud storage is very similar to Dropbox. However there is no way to exclude the local previews from the sync. That causes easily gigabytes of storage requirement and even worse, lengthy data transfer for practically a cache data. This is my primary reason for not using CC-cloud for the LR-library.

        For the image masters one might use CC or DB to transfer the new images to the permanent storage. And one they have been stored into the actual archive storage they only need Smart Previews to be fully ediable across all devices.

        Google drive does not currently support arbirtrary file types and storing Lightroom library there might in my humble opinion be likely to corrupt the data-files. This is because LR-library is actually a SQLite database and will have random write operations all over the file not just to its end. And that kind of operations require delicate sync throttling to avoid partial syncs with nonconsistent big picture. It seems that Dropbox is better in handling this, but my opinion is likely outdated on the details.

        -Pete

          V
          vlassov
          Participant
          May 11, 2015

          Thanks a lot for this Pete, Dropbox seems to be working our quite well here.

          P
          Playful_Dragonfly1549
          Participating Frequently
          April 24, 2015

          Dropbox has Selective Sync option under Settings -> Account. There one may set Dropbox to ignore certain folders under Dropbox root. For example in the image below I have set Dropbox to ignore LR previews.

            Mike Boening
            Mike Boening
            Participant
            April 10, 2015

            My LR catalog which is on dropbox has the conflicted word in it.  What are my next steps to get this back to a proper catalog?

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