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Multi Computer Workflow for Lightroom Classic

Community Beginner ,
Oct 10, 2024 Oct 10, 2024

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I've never found a workflow that works well in my use case — hoping some of you all can help:

1) Shooting Tethered to a desktop (Lightroom Classic)

2) Sometimes Processing on that Machine but...

3) Sometimes need to process on a second machine

 

I'd prefer to keep everything in Classic (since the tools aren't quite the same between them, and I have a different license on the second machine anyway).

 

The online editor doesn't work very well for my needs.

 

I'm fine connecting the machines to transfer images, but want to make it simple, fast and seamless.

 

Any thoughts are much appreciated!

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Community Expert ,
Oct 10, 2024 Oct 10, 2024

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The easiest and most seamless option is probably to save your catalog and your images onto an external hard drive. Then you can simply connect that external drive to the other computer and work with the same catalog on that other computer. 

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 10, 2024 Oct 10, 2024

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Like it! Would you just backup at shutdown to a second source (in this case, the internal drive of the desktop machine)? As I don't always trust the little drives without some redundancy.

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Community Expert ,
Oct 10, 2024 Oct 10, 2024

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Yes, I always backup my catalog when I shut down Lightroom, and obviously not to the same drive. The advantage of letting Lightroom Classic make a catalog backup is that it also verifies the integrity and optimizes the catalog in this process. Then after that is done I would also use a separate backup utility to backup the entire disk in this particular setup, because Lightroom does not backup the images, just the catalog.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 10, 2024 Oct 10, 2024

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I should add - the reason for the desktop is other folks use it to access images (pulling them to send to clients, etc...). Thinking through this, it might be better to keep the files that are retouched and ready for use in a shared collection that they can view/access/export through Lightroom (not classic)...

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Community Expert ,
Oct 10, 2024 Oct 10, 2024

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Lightroom Classic was built as a single-user app in 2007, and its architecture is not set up for any kind of multi-user access. Many people have devised workarounds, but they’re very much considered “at your own risk,” which isn’t recommended for any kind of work where a team needs to be able to rely on it and where data loss is not acceptable.

 

But there are possibilities. I’m starting to hear about workgroup services for these apps through add-ons.

One is Mediagraph, a service that offers a Publish Services plug-in for Lightroom Classic , and a Connection for cloud Lightroom.

 

I haven’t used Mediagraph, so I can’t say how good it is. But one of the principals of Mediagraph is Peter Krogh, who is a long-time expert in digital asset management using Lightroom Classic and other Adobe apps; his books are great.

Adobe itself is introducing Lightroom support for frame.io, the workgroup editing service it acquired that’s popular in pro video and is extending to photography workflows. But it works only with cloud Lightroom, not Lightroom Classic, and it’s still in beta.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 10, 2024 Oct 10, 2024

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Curious what you like for a 3rd party backup...

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Community Expert ,
Oct 11, 2024 Oct 11, 2024

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LATEST
quote

Curious what you like for a 3rd party backup...


By @dougr11903954


There are a lot of good utilities. I use Time Machine only to backup my internal drive, but it can backup external drives as well. For backups of external drives I use Carbon Copy Cloner.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Community Expert ,
Oct 10, 2024 Oct 10, 2024

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This is the right answer. You can now even get 4TB SSD drives for 200 to 250$ that are extremely reliable and fast. Format it APFS (if you're on a Mac) for best performance, put the catalog you're capturing into on it and point the destination for tethered capture on it too and shoot away. Quit Classic on the capture machine (so all last changes are written) and unmount the drive and you can use it on any other Classic installation.  If you're mixing and matching windows machines and Macs, the only viable option without using third party tools is to format as exFAT and that will work fine as long as you always carefully unmount the drives from each machine.

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Community Expert ,
Oct 11, 2024 Oct 11, 2024

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If you use mixed Windows and Mac, then also make sure to store the images in a folder (hierarchy) that is inside the catalog folder. That avoids having to 'reconnect' missing folders each time you switch platforms.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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