Way for others to view your photos

Report · Nov 13, 2016

Before lightroom, I used to have my 200,000 photos on a NAS drive, and photoshop edited copies would be held in the same directories as the originals with _a, _b etc in the file name. I used iSCSI to mount the NAS drive when editing.

Anyone in my family could view them any time by browsing the NAS share in read only mode (so they could not delete or modify them). My wife would take them and make photo books, calendars, and send out photos of our kids to friends and distant family.

Happy times.

Then about 5 years ago I got lightroom and laptop with 2TB ssd. Since then, all my photos are locked onto my laptop in the lighroom catalog and on the SSD, and my wife and children only see about 1% of the photos which I have time to edit and publish to Facebook or my professional website or similar.

When I retire, I might have time to go through my half a million photos, edit them, and publish them to a website in high res.

Lightroom has killed photography for my family. Now the only photos anyone sees are the few my wife takes with her phone which she instant shares on FB.

I am hoping that someone out there will make a view app, which allows someone on a PC or ipad or simialr to view and copy the edited and not yet edited photos (but not let them edit or delete them!!!!) which are on my laptop (while it is running and connected to the local LAN of course).

Until that day, lightroom has killed photography, sharing and collaboration for our family. There are no more photobooks, no more printed photos, as my wife has no read only access to browse ALL the pictures on my laptop on her laptop or ipad.

I am a professional photographer with about £50,000 worth of camera kit. I work 12 hours a day, so cant spend hours editing, publishing and managing external hard drives or other method of giving photos to my family to work with.

If anyone knows of an app, or hack, or way to share photos locked into lightroom, let me know. I was even thinking about writing an app which can run on the machine lightroom is running on, and produces a dynamic website which sucks data out of lightroom catalog and thumbnail database, to produce a way my family can brows and download the complete set of photos, then use some external apps such as picassa to create photobooks or edit them if they are not edited.

Its a shame adobe has completely missed the family market. It should have an application, e.g. lightroom lite, which allows people on your local network to view your catalog, and even create their own edits which are uploaded automatically into your master catalog if you have allowed this on the folder. I am guessing Adobe made a huge mistake when they chose an ancient single user database as their catalog implemenation. Hopefully someone like apple or google will come up with a multiuser family oriented version of lightroom.

Report · Feb 12, 2018

There actually is a way to host your Library files on any NAS. From macOS, use Disk Utility to create a new volume image on the NAS. You will have to mount it and unmount it, but Lr will see it as a normal drive. When you mount it, another use of the NAS won't be able to mount it while you have it open. This is a good thing as it will protect your Library from being corrupted from simultaneous access. When unmounted, the volume simply appears on the NAS as a single file.

The downside to this is that any small change to any file within the Library will show the entire volume as changed and will trigger a full backup of that SparseImage file. (if you have automatic backups going from your NAS). This could be problematic if that file becomes large enough to take days to back up.

Report · Feb 12, 2018

There are lots of ways to solve the immediate problem. Simplest is to set up a publish service in Lightroom that publishes jpeg copies to a shared folder on your NAS. Just put a smart collection in the publish service that automatically publishes all family images. You can also have a publish service publish to a dropbox, google drive, Microsoft one drive, Amazon web, or iCloud drive folder and have that folder shared with your family so the images automatically show up on their machines or mobile devices. Alternatively simply publish the images to Facebook using the built-in Facebook publish plugin into an album shared with your family members only. Simple and easy to use and the family will love it.

That seems to work for me for the same thing. Lightroom is just way to opaque for them to even consider some kind of shared solution. They like Apple Photos, Facebook or instagram. Anything more complex and it is just not worth the effort.

Report · Feb 12, 2018

If anyone knows of an app, or hack, or way to share photos locked into lightroom, let me know. I was even thinking about writing an app which can run on the machine lightroom is running on, and produces a dynamic website which sucks data out of lightroom catalog and thumbnail database, to produce a way my family can brows and download the complete set of photos, then use some external apps such as picassa to create photobooks or edit them if they are not edited.

Yeah this is all built in. Publish services can do this for you. Publish to a typical NAS and it will index and present the mages in a neat interface for you. You just have to hit the publish now button once in a while to update it. Publish to a web service such as smugmug, Facebook, snapfish, zenfolio, etc. and you'll have automated galleries, keyword searching, etc.

Report · Feb 13, 2018

@jao vdL, thanks for the reply. smugmug etc, is not really an option, because

I have 1TB+ of images.
you loose all the tagging I have painstakingly done over the last 5 years in lightroom.
There are two types of files. Those I have not processed - about 750GB of raw files, and those I have processed and prodcued around 100GB of manicured albums (aka collections in lightroom). These I do upload to zenfolio, in a hierarchy (places, people, travel etc)
There is no plugin for zenfolio unfortunately.
I tried the smugmug publish plugin some years back, and it was unusable in that if I upload the raw files, then later processed them, or edited one, I would have to upload the whole lot again, and it was more work than manually curating the files. The workflow was horrible for large numbers of files. I dont know if its works better now.

The main problem is that all the files are carefully indexed and tagged in LR, and all the manual export options lose this data so the resultant "raw dump" is unsearchable.

What I need is a read only way for family access my lrcat, without having to buy a complete new licence. I still have no solution.

Report · Feb 13, 2018

1. You shouldn't be giving them raw files. They are useless to folks without Lightroom or Photoshop camera raw. So using a publish service you should set it up to export jpegs which are useful to normal folks

2. No you don't. All of the metadata tagging is embedded in the exported files. Apps like Picasa, Apple Photos, etc. read all this metadata and you will have searchable keywords, etc.

3. That makes sense. Zenfolio should have all your keywords in place.

4. Yes there is: Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s “Export to Zenfolio” Lightroom Plugin

5. Not sure what you mean. You don't upload raw files but jpeg copies with these publish plugins. It will only re-upload the files that are changed not the "whole lot"

The main problem is that all the files are carefully indexed and tagged in LR, and all the manual export options lose this data so the resultant "raw dump" is unsearchable.

You don't lose any of that. The exported files will have all the keywording and metadata you tagged you images with. This will make the exported files searchable just fine.