Best way to use LRC on two Macs in different locations?

[mhorvath]

So I have been trying to manage all our pictures for the company I work with LRC. (I tried LR with the cloud too but I just prefer the larger abilities of editing)

For now I used it with a OneDrive storage. All the orginals are on there and the LRC data is in a seperate folder in the same server. But apperantly this often leads to editing mistakes (pictures editing getting reset).

Now the company wants to change their storing plan and I wondered if I could change the LRC workflow for a more efficient one.

Important is that I can access the pictures both from my workplace and home. So online access is absolutely needed. Also of course it should be secure and offer enough storage space for all the RAW files. An external harddrive to carry around all the time wouldn’t really work. Any ideas how I could set this up to work?

[Ian Lyons]

An external drive containing the catalog and photo files is the most reliable method and by far the most common approach for the workflow you describe. However, you appear to be ruling that out as an option. 

Cloud Storage or remotely accessible NAS for storing the photo files are feasible, but the catalog would still need to be on a local drive (i.e. external drive that you carry with you).

[mhorvath]

For now I tried to run LR with both the original pictures and the Catalouge on a OneDrive Cloud, so I could access it at home and at work. Though this provided some problems. Often the pictures would load in very slow and also the edits on the pictures would often vanish or reset, even though everything was synced up. I don’t exactly know where the problem is but from another post of mine others told me that LR doesn’t really function with cloud storage.

The system with an external drive would probably work best, and just for safety backing up the pictures on a different system too.

As far as I know for now my boss wants to move away from the OneDrive system completly and implement a NAS Server at workplace which I can access then via a VPN from home. 

I don’t know yet if it will work that I can store the originals on the NAS and put the catalouge on a big USB stick to carry around from home to work or if I have to use an external drive with both pictures and catalouge on it, and just use the NAS for backup.

[JohanElzenga]

I agree with @Ian Lyons that having everything on a portable drive would be the most reliable solution. Lightroom Classic is not designed to work with cloud only files and definitely not with a catalog on a network, so if you rule out the portable disk option then your only choice is a cloud synced solution, where a local folder is synced with the cloud. That can work and should not cause edits to be reset, but remember this: the Lightroom Classic catalog can become quite big; it will easily be over 1 GB. That means you need to give the computers enough time to sync. If you make some edits and then immediately thereafter close down the computer, then you can be certain that these edits won't have synced when you open the catalog on the other computer.

[TheDigitalDog]

+2; portable external drive. So many advantages (like you can have multiple such drives as backups), with a good syncing utility (on Mac, SuperDuper as one example), you now have multiple rotating backups too. 

[Ian Lyons]

I bought a 4TB one of these when they are a bit cheaper than Amazon now sells them https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-4TB-Extreme-Portable-SDSSDE61-4T00-G25/dp/B08RX4QKXS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=...

but also have a 4TB version of https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-Resistant-Photographers-MU-PE2T0S-AM/dp/B0BHZQGN26/ref=sr_1_2?crid=18...

Both super small and light.