Lightroom Classic multiuser environment

[David228223677z6b]

Hello,

my customer is some graphic agency, where multiple users work on the same lightroom classic projects with Mac devices.

The user is using google drive to sync all the company data between the devices.

Unfortunaltely he cannot open lightroom projects from google drive, as the program tells that opening projects from network drives is not supported.

Is there some workaround to get this working?

Thanks in advance

[ManiacJoe]

There is no workaround for this. Lightroom Classic is a single-user system. LrC or the underlying database system  (not sure which) purposely prevents the location of the catalog/database from being used on a network drive to make it harder for multiple users to attempt usage at the same time, which would corrupt the database.

Storing the catalog on a network drive is fine -- and can help with backups -- but not using it from a network drive. In this case the user would need to:

- copy the catalog and its supporting files from the network to a local drive

- use the catalog on the local drive

- copy the catalog and supporting files back to the network drive

Note: the original images can happily stay on the network drive. The catalog does not care where the images are.

[dj_paige]

Unfortunaltely he cannot open lightroom projects from google drive, as the program tells that opening projects from network drives is not supported.

Is there some workaround to get this working?

No.

Doing so would place your catalog at very high risk of being corrupted because of the attempts to synchronize the cloud version with the local version.

[josephlavine]

Unfortunately, what you are hoping to do is not practical. Lightroom Classic is designed for single users working off one main Catalog.

warmly/j

[David228223677z6b]

Thank you very much for the fast answers. Is there some similiar adobe tool that can be used with multiple users?

[dj_paige]

Is there some similiar adobe tool that can be used with multiple users?

No

Go to your favorite internet search engine and search for photographic software that does allow multiple users. Those tools are out there.

[DS256]

"Thank you very much for the fast answers. Is there some similiar adobe tool that can be used with multiple users?" It sounds like your client needs to look at multi-user Digital Asset Managers (DAM) that could support a central library. Individual users could then check out photos to work on. However, I am not sure about how you would share versions/changes that were LrC based unless you shared the RAW+XMP file. Still tricky since as others have pointed  out, LrC is a single user DAM.

[Lumigraphics]

Adobe Experience Manager.

[john beardsworth]

Hard to see how AEM is relevant . It may be multi-user but its for web site content management and has little crossover with LR's capabilities.

[Lumigraphics]

Its the only multi-user DAM that Adobe publishes.

[john beardsworth]

It's not a DAM.

[john beardsworth]

If they simply want to adjust using Adobe's adjustment tools, then they could all use Adobe Bridge. This is like LR's Develop, using the Adobe Camera Raw engine, but Bridge is based on the file system and records its data in the image folders.

Metadata can be entered using Adobe Bridge too. As with adjustments, when one user makes changes those edits are seen by other users too.

LR's role is a single-user digital asset management tool that covers the whole photographic workflow, while Bridge is a glorified version of Finder or Explorer and doesn't manage the images. If a user moves some photos, other users will have to go looking for them. Bridge can't do stuff like printing or assignment to map locations, and its collections are hidden from other users.

What you might also try is keeping each project in a catalogue and in a folder, then moving that folder onto the computer of the user that needs to work on it.