Working on Photos from Two Different Locations

[default97hvftxb47xy]

I've been using DXO Photolab but am now interested in switching to Lightroom but I'm not sure if it will work in my situation.

When I'm in Florida, I'll take pics and work on them on my desktop there.  DXO saves each photo's changes in a small .dop file with the photo.  My photos are all backed up to the cloud. 

When I get back to Pittsburgh.  I can download the photos with .dop files and see all the changes and continue any edits. 

I don't know how I'd do this in Lightroom because there is a "catalog" that isn't shared between the two computers.  Any thoughts on how I could do this?

Thanks.  

[dj_paige]

If you are talking about Lightroom (Lr icon), your photos are shared in the cloud and can be accessed by whatever device you want, no problem.

If you are talking about Lightroom Classic (LrC icon), then you would have to physically move the catalog from one computer to another.

So which are you talking about?

[default97hvftxb47xy]

Classic. 

[Jao vdL]

There are people who do this by syncing their catalog through a cloud service but this is fraught with major issues and possible data loss so I would strongly recommend against this. What you should do is NOT use Lightroom Classic but use Adobe Bridge. You already have a subscription if you have the photography plan that comes with Classic and Photoshop. Bridge, using the camera raw plugin, does everything that Classic's Develop screen does (and much much more such as metadata edits and such) but is based around a file browser instead of a catalog. It invokes camera raw for raw files and saves edits in xmp sidecars just like you are used to in DxO. So this is easy and fast to sync through a cloud service indeed if you just place the images in a cloud synced folder.

Bridge is strangely unknown but it is a fantastic tool for collaboration (works great on shared dropbox folders full of images for example) and does almost everything that Classic does and can do a bunch of things Classic cannot. 

[default97hvftxb47xy]

After doing some reading, I thought that Classic had the ability to save XMP files too...

[Jao vdL]

It does but only as a backup of the settings. If you're going to rely on the xmp files you would have to be religious about reading from metadata in Classic on the other side. There is a lot of potential for dataloss. Bridge/ACR uses the xmp metadata files as the main repository of metadata and settings. Lightroom Classic uses the catalog file as the main repository and the xmp files that it can write are just meant as a way of backing up the settings. It also doesn't work correctly if you use a lot of virtual copies.