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Question

Lightroom on two computers

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
August 23, 2012
5 replies
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I have Lightroom 4 on an IMac and store all my photo files on an external HD.

I recently purchased a Mac Book Pro and have installed lightroom and my main catalogue on it. I have the actual images on a portable hard drive.

How can I work on images on my desktop and then import the changes to the images on the laptop. I also wish to be able to work in lightroom on the laptop and update the changes on my desktop and main HD.

Have googled this but very confused.

This topic has been closed for replies.

rudytheelder

Participating Frequently

I'm a guy who likes to keep all my photos from the last ten years on in a single catalog. For various reasons that I won't get into here, this is viewed by some as a reasonable thing to do. But the catalog is large. Mostly I work on my photos on my desktop machine.

When I'm on vacation, I sometimes put photos on my laptop and, for fun I might edit them a bit in Lightroom. I don't keep a full catalog on my laptop, as I don't want to use all that space on it's drive. And I don't feel like trying to export and import catalogs or trying to keep a catalog on an external hard drive.

So if I have, say, fifty images that I've edited while on vacation---what the heck, I just export them as maximum size JPGs and copy those JPGs over to my desktop so I don't lose the edits. I'm not compulsive enough to want to save the unedited state of those images, I just overwrite the old files with the new ones.

Snemanje poroke

Participating Frequently

I really do not adwise you to do that. I used to resize my 3-Mpx images to fit my screen (1024x768) and save HDD space. Now, 15-years later I am stuck with overedited and resized 0,7Mpx images, that some of them already failed to open. While original 3Mpx images, thoose who somehow escaped my habbit, still holds more data than 10x15 cm print can reproduce and more fidelity to drag details from. Since new processes in new Lr keeps geting more out of SAME images. Plus as from my experience original images are fails less often than new edited one. Reason is probably that JPEG file, which is very prone for corruption, are likely safer when you leave it at one place on HDD (every copy can produce error. Error in JPEG is quickly enough to render image corrupt. edited images tend to be more fragmented than original one, ... ).
Make edits and copy the image. Having second copy is safer, for JPEGs even on same computer it reduce risk of corruption of certain image.

But if you do not care for picture to have the safe, why then bother with edting?

Regards.

G

glugglug

Known Participant

I recently went through some old jpg files, family stuff shot on a 3Mp Canon Ixus. I work by culling my pictures ruthlessly, keeping only the best or most unusual/ interesting ones but rarely duplicates of them (It's one of the few ways of having people be glad to see your holiday pix, 10 max). I'm an ex newspaper photographer so rigorous editing is second nature to me.

No matter what editing I do, I always keep the original untouched. One shot, of my family at dusk walking through a field of maize was a lovely picture but hopelessly noisy. LR current noise reduction is 20 times better than the specialist NR software I had when i took the shot back in 2003 and yields a still noisy but very acceptable quality result. It transforms the picture, really. I'm with Snemanje 100% here.

M

makausqld

New Participant

The best solution I have found is to use BitTorrent Sync to keep the catelogs in sync across multiple computer. The only thing you have to do is in the computer you are working pause the syncing while you are working.

K

kid.carter

New Participant

Another solution is to keep both your Lightroom catalogue & your photographs in a cloud storage location (usualy located in c:\users area on a PC), this will automatically be synchronized between your desktop & laptop in the background. The biggest issue here is that the size of your pictures/catalogue directories needs to be contained within your cloud storage allowance. In my case I rarely have more than 20GB (the size of my Adobe cloud with the Photographers CC subscription) a year so plan on creating a new catalogue each year which will then be stored on my desktop & a back-up hard disk.

SdeGat

Inspiring

Thanks kid.carter. That was the question I asked just a few posts above. I did map the network drive and it did work but found I sometimes launched LR before the mapping was finished. My catalog is (currently) just over 200 MB, I guess it would be fine on Google Drive. Did you try it yourself?

P

Paolo_67

New Participant

Hi

You can store your catalog on a dropbox folder and share it with as many computers as you need. And it's backed up too.

There are severals tutorials around, here's one http://www.vdsar.net/lightroom-catalog-sync-with-dropbox/

SdeGat

Inspiring

Thanks Paolo67.

I'm a bit surprised to read that: I can't use my own network drive (which should be much faster I would think) but I can use something like Dropbox?

Does that make sense?

R

richardplondon

Community Expert

I'm a bit surprised to read that: I can't use my own network drive (which should be much faster I would think) but I can use something like Dropbox?
Does that make sense?

A dropbox-managed folder is no different in terms of its access, AFAICT, than any other folder that is stored on the same physical disk volume.

What your PC "sees" at any given moment with Dropbox is not all the stuff in the cloud, just the locally stored copy - as that currently stands.

The point is AFAICT, that LR wants to enjoy direct access without intermediate layers of network protocols etc. It doesn't mind using a more distant form of addressing for the image files, but the database is.. close-to-home.

Mapping a network location via the OS "under the guise of" a (virtual, simulated) local drive, with its own drive reference, may work.

SdeGat

Inspiring

I am in a similar situation.

In my case, I store my pictures on a network drive and access them from a desktop, and a laptop. I would have to move the catalog to the network drive if I understand correctly and that's not a big deal. How about the pictures only present on one of the two computers though, would they be just greyed out in the catalog? For example if I want to work on some pictures off-line outside of the house. Could I move pictures from the network drive to the laptop, work off-line, and move them back when I come back? Or would the catalog get all corrupted depending if I use the other computer?

I am a bit worried about the process since LR has a bug in the "update folder location" and will duplicate my entire network drive when I use the function to "catch" pictures that would have been moved/copied/imported outside of LR. (I think Victoria already helped me out with that problem actually)

D

donrisi

Participating Frequently

It is my understanding that Lightroom won't let you open a catalog that's located on a network drive. Al least, I get an error message when I try that. If anyone has a work around to that, I'd love to hear it.

areohbee

Brainiac

drisi wrote:
It is my understanding that Lightroom won't let you open a catalog that's located on a network drive. Al least, I get an error message when I try that. If anyone has a work around to that, I'd love to hear it.

The simplest workaround is what Victoria suggested: don't put it on the network (use external drive instead).

If you absolutely must keep it on the network, then you'll "have to" copy it to local host before using, and make sure it's copied back to network afterward. consider LightroomStartupScript if you decide to go that route.

One can fool Lightroom into using it from the network, but it's:

* slow

* unreliable (may corrupt your catalog)

Those should be good enough reasons not to do it.

Rob

Victoria Bampton LR Queen

Community Expert

The simplest solution is to put the catalog on the external hard drive, and then you can easily plug it in and use it from either machine. There are alternatives, including using import and export to/from catalog, but they then require you to keep track of which you last used.

_______________________________________________Victoria - The Lightroom Queen - Author of the Lightroom Missing FAQ & Edit on the Go books.

G

glugglug

Known Participant

Victoria Bampton wrote:
The simplest solution is to put the catalog on the external hard drive, and then you can easily plug it in and use it from either machine.

I use Lightroom on 2 computers, one in England and one in France. I have all my images, catalogs, keywords etc on a USB3 portable disk and I just up sticks and plug it in where I am.

I use a Windows 7 64 bit machine in both places and have the disk designated as W: on both machines.

It works seamlessly but obviously for it to work all manipulation of images must be from within Lightroom and within the portable disk.

One question, maybe Victoria would know the answer - naturally, Lightroom is installed on my C: system disk. If I were to upgrade to the new RC on my London machine, how would that affect things when I first plug it in on my France machine which would still have LR 4.1 installed? Any steps I should take to take account of the fact that my registry and so on will of necessity be different on my 2 machines?

G

glugglug

Known Participant

glugglug wrote:
One question, maybe Victoria would know the answer - naturally, Lightroom is installed on my C: system disk. If I were to upgrade to the new RC on my London machine, how would that affect things when I first plug it in on my France machine which would still have LR 4.1 installed? Any steps I should take to take account of the fact that my registry and so on will of necessity be different on my 2 machines?

There are no catalog changes that I know of, so it should be fine.

Thanks!

I caused myself some problems when I upgarded from LR3 to 4 in England and then took the disk to France where I had LR3 running. I'm not sure what would have been the best way to handle that but I'm sure going to have to find find out before LR4 morphs into LR5.

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