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barbaras81920612
New Participant
February 22, 2019
Answered

Using Lightroom across two computers with external HDD.

  • February 22, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 6271 views

Hi, I am also relatively new to Lightroom Classic CC, but I have been using an external hard drive when traveling as I, too, need to edit photos across on two computers, an iMac and a Macbook Pro. So I have loaded all my library photos onto my Seagate external drive and it works very nicely with my Macbook Pro while traveling. But I thought since I only have one account with Adobe, and that when I sign on to LR on Mac desktop, LR should recognize the Seagate external drive. It turned out my LR has no inkling of the existence of the photo library on Seagate, and the only way my desktop LR can have access to the photo library on the external hard drive is to import them once more, as I already did onto to laptop, to the LR on my desktop. While is this repetitious importation necessary?

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    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Just Shoot Me

    You need to place the LR catalog file, the one that has all the images imported into it, on that same external drive and open it, Use that catalog, on both computers when moving the external drive.

    2 replies

    JP Hess
    JP Hess
    Inspiring
    February 22, 2019

    The catalog can remain on the external hard drive and reference the images that are on that drive.

    B
    barbaras81920612Author
    New Participant
    February 22, 2019

    Thank you for your reply. I did exactly that. I was hoping to find a way that enable automatic sync without having to import every time when I plug in the external hard drive. But I guess that is what I have to do.

    S
    Sophi Photo Memoir
    New Participant
    January 24, 2022

    barbaras81920612  wrote

    Thank you for your reply. I did exactly that. I was hoping to find a way that enable automatic sync without having to import every time when I plug in the external hard drive. But I guess that is what I have to do.

    You are completely missing the point.

    If you have your WORKING catalog on the external drive and you open that catalog on each computer you use LR on you won't need to re-import any images. You import them once to that WORKING catalog on the external drive and when you move that external drive to the other computer and OPEN that same catalog on the external drive all the images will be there.


    I just came off the phone with Lightroom rep, did all of that and the 3 files that were edited on computer one did not show up on computer two with the edits

    Just Shoot Me
    Just Shoot MeCorrect answer
    Brainiac
    February 22, 2019

    You need to place the LR catalog file, the one that has all the images imported into it, on that same external drive and open it, Use that catalog, on both computers when moving the external drive.

    B
    barbaras81920612Author
    New Participant
    February 22, 2019

    Thanks for your reply. That is exactly what I have done.

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