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A
andrewa42545395
Participant
June 1, 2018
Question

Can 2 people with 2 licenses work on one photo library?

  • June 1, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 224 views

I recently purchased Elements 2018 for Windows, and plan to store my photos on a NAS. If my wife buys Elements for Mac, will she be able to use / add to / edit the same library using her version of Elements 2018 for Mac?

We are trying to merge 2 large sets of photos from various sources into one curated library, and want to use a consistent structure and tags/ keywords. I realize we might have to set up the 2 copies of Elements to ensure they have the same default directories and keywords.

Thanks

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    1 reply

    MichelBParis
    MichelBParis
    Legend
    June 1, 2018

    I believe you won't be able to share your catalog and library on a NAS. The catalog can't be stored in a NAS. Don't ask me why... but maybe try another sharing solution.

    What is very common is to share the catalog and library if they reside on an external drive that you can plug in alternatively to two computers with the same Elements version. That works with two Windows computers, but I believe it should work with one Windows and one Mac computer. Maybe other users can confirm if that works (I have no Mac) but I would download the free trial version for the mac to check what happens. You do a backup on an external drive and restore on the final external drive. That puts both your library and the catalog on the final drive. Of course, you can't work simultaneously, but your work is immediately available for the other computer.

    Merging catalogs is not easy in Elements, see:

    Photoshop Elements 6/7/8 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

    A
    andrewa42545395Author
    Participant
    June 1, 2018

    Understood.

    As an alternative, if I use Elements on the Windows computer and back up to

    the NAS, are the photos accessible to the Mac user as files with tags

    independent of the catalog? I.e we share use of the Windows Machine to

    organize and tag with Elements but we can select and print / share photos

    from the NAS?

    MichelBParis
    MichelBParis
    Legend
    June 1, 2018

    andrewa42545395  wrote

    Understood.

    As an alternative, if I use Elements on the Windows computer and back up to

    the NAS, are the photos accessible to the Mac user as files with tags

    independent of the catalog?

    I like the idea to manage the catalog on an external drive as described above, and to backup on the NAS.

    For instance, I use Microsoft SyncToy to sync my library after each session to another drive. The advantage is that it's very fast compared with a backup from the Organizer. Of course, the library is available from all computers linked to the NAS; with the keywords if you 'write metadata to files', shortcut Ctrl W.

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