When can we expect to see lightroom mobile able to handle sync'ing multiple catalogs? As it is with the limitation to a single catalog it is very limited in a real business case scenario...
Lightroom was always designed around and recommended as a single-catalog workflow solution. While many people use multiple catalogs and Lightroom can function moderately well in that environ, that isn't its first design criteria. I am changing your question to a feature request to see if others will vote for it.
Thanks for changing this to a feature request - that's effectively what I wanted it to be, but obviously missed that option!
I hear what you are saying about the single-catalog workflow solution, but interestingly in the 3 or so years since I have been using lightroom I have never seen anything official about that, or in any of the marketing/setup instruction etc. Not saying that I went through everything with a fine tooth comb, but my approach to technology has always been to explore the capabilities of a system and see how it can be best adapted to suit the local requirements. So when a feature is provided in software, you would expect that you should realistically be able to use it. I would have thought if they were so adamant about the single catalog workflow issue, then they should have removed the ability to have multiple catalogs in the first place? Why put a feature in there that you are just going to restrict people on down the track.
I say all this with some experience as a software developer for over 20 years, so it's not like I am not aware of the issues and considerations that need to be taken when designing and developing software packages. And I'm not lost on the gap that exists between the design intentions and the end-user usage scenarios that constantly plague developers, but bridging that gap has always been the sign of great software packages.
In fact the main reason I went to the effort of even posting such a question is due to the fact that I have been positively impressed with the shift in responsiveness of Adobe since the rollout of creative cloud and the fact that they can, and often do, react quickly to feature requests and new technologies and implement those changes in a very timely fashion (well in comparison to the historical software lifecycle anyway!)
So I hope other that may be interested in this feature can raise their voices and be heard so that Adobe may look at what they can do to make this happen 🙂
There's nothing official. However, while you can use Lightroom with multiple catalogues, it works best as a single catalogue, as you see when you examine the features. For example, there is no cross-catalogue searching or other cross-catalogue functions, while multi-catalogue features are designed around the need to move work around computers (eg the Export as Catalag and Import from Another Catalog features).
But LR does allow multiple catalogues, so how do you expect a multi-catalogue LrM to operate? Do you expect a sort of one-to-one relationship, so you'd open catalogue A in LrM, then catalogue B etc? Or do you expect LrM to be a single overarching interface, so the same picture may exist in both a laptop and a desktop catalogue and LrM edits will propagate to each?
Also, rather than claiming there is a real business case scenario (which there may be), it's better to outline what it is.
I also use multiple catalogs in Lightroom. I have over 30,000 photos and maintenance as a single catalog was cumbersome. Load and save times are long, and I had to carry around a dedicated external hard drive to work with that catalog, as it exceeded 500 gb. adobe revel allowed multi catalog support and this should be a feature in Lightroom mobile...I wish adobe revel was still supported.
In addition, Lightroom mobile does not support sharing of albums, only single photos, which is another limitation related to adobe revel.
i am using lr only as an amateur, but use multiple catalogs.
i shoot a lot when travelling and i have a notebook with me so i start out every journey with a fresh catalog. i get up to 10-20k raw images per trip. added to that are timelapses and thousands of gopro joegs.
merging all this into a single catalog is just madness. it becomes impossible to move around on mobile disks or backup into cloud storage. thumbnails/smart previews are all in one gigantic folder eating diskspace like there is no tomorrow.
so i am going to stick to multi catalog.
my main reason for getting lr mobile was rating/sorting on the go, i hoped i could crowdsource the rating and sorting with friends and family. that becomes impossible if i can only have one catalog at a time in mobile.
as for implementation, i think lr mobile should just be able to store multiple catalogs. add one more hierachy level on top. make them visible in the mobile apps? i don't really care. i'd be fine with a warning if my collection names collide and being forced to keep them unique across catalogs.
For those reasons, I now have different catalogs and sometime events (resulting in separate catalogs) overlap and of course I would like to send customers links so that they can make their selections.
Reading the original question and having just installed Lightroom CC I agree with most comments: there is definitely a compelling need to allow syncing with more than one catalog.
As most comments make the point: I have a travelling Macbook and a big powerful desktop and use generally two catalogs. If I am travelling, I would like to push some photos via syncing to iOS devices. When back, I work on more photos on my desktop and would like to push some of them as well on my iOS devices. Putting one catalog on a NAS drive is not practical as when travelling I will need a local copy.
Call me cynical, but from the point of view of Adobe, allowing only single catalog syncing is an interesting deal. They may think I will put it in their Cloud so that I can access it from both computers. Then the volume will increase and I probably will have to pay extra for more space?. But then, even though I have not tried it, I have reservations as to whether the performances will be good enough. And if travelling to a location where internet access is slow or inexistant, I would still need a local catalog. Merging catalog is a feature I have not yet fully mastered in particular if vertual copies of photos are involved.
So, after this long argument, we definitely need multiple catalog syncing!
" If I am travelling, I would like to push some photos via syncing to iOS devices. "
Then log into https://lightroom.adobe.com/ and you can drag photos from their folders and drop into your browser window. The photos will upload to Adobe's server, and previews will sync down to iOS devices. The original will appear in your catalogue at home.
More generally, since smart previews were introduced it is more practical to take your main catalogue on trips. The catalogue itself is not big, and you don't need to take the original pictures if you want to work on any existing pictures - you can do a lot of work with just the smart previews.
I work as photographer and create a new catalogue for each job. Simple reason is, that on a job you make 10000 pictures for example, the next job again and so on.
With so many pictures altogether, you have in one year several hundred thousand pictures. After a job is finished, with selection, editing and all that stuff, I save them twice external and put them away on archive. And when i need it again, I get the HD with all the file, including the lightroom catalogue. I open the catalogue and have everything in place very fast. My thinking is that in seperating the projects catalogues, you keep a better overview of all the work you have done. Also when sharing a project with an external editor you hand over the catalogue and thats it.
The sync on a cloud would be interesting for me only if i could sync for example my
selection or finished editing collection on the phone or pad and show different jobs on occasion.
So I would vote for multiple catalogue sync
It would help a lot if Lr could work from a Catalogue stored on an external HD.
Then one could simply connect that drive to whichever computer one was using at the time and also use a Sync operation to copy only newer files or metadata to update the resident catalogue on the other computer.
Is there anyway to push a collection of photos to Lightroom Mobile without using the web interface? Should I be able to do this in Lightroom on desktop/laptop?
Let's I have a collection of travel photos on desktop at home AND a collection of wedding photos on laptop in the office. And I want to use Lightroom Mobile to show these photos to my friends and clients. Right now I cannot do this easily with the desktop version of Lightroom.
Ideally I can push these collections to the cloud from desktop and laptop simultaneously. And the my friends and clients can rate and comment on these photos with their phones. I can choose to "mount" the wedding collection on my desktop at home, but I am not forced to do so if I really just want to use my work laptop to edit these photos.
I like LR for its beautiful design and functionality. The only thing that needs Adobe's attention for LR now is PERFORMANCE (sorry for screaming) and for that reason I concur with all the above contributors. Performance is not on PAR with other photo editors.
+1 on this feature request. it's a pain that LrM only syncs with one catalog. Since it's only syncing collections, it really shouldn't matter what catalog makes the sync request. And I'd venture to say that anyone who uses Lr for professional work is using multiple catalogs.
Yes - different strokes for different folks I guess. I recently started some commercial photoshoots and putting those in the same catalog didn't completely make sense. I am aware that Lightroom does give you enough options to separate things within one catalog, but I guess it just makes sense when you can cut down on distractions (family photos, dog photos, the photos from the last trip that your auntie made and things of that nature!)
Lightroom Mobile: Please add the ability to Sync multiple CATALOGS at the same time. Have tiered pricing for larger cloud capacities...er whatever you need to do to justify it. JUST PLEASE add support for multiple catalogs. 🙂
Add me to the list that votes to allow lightroom mobile to sync to different catalogs. I do portrait, wedding, real estate as well as professional and college sports. I use a macbook for all my sports photography and then my iMac to process all other types. I use a Nikon D4 with the WT5 transmitter connecting to an FTP server. I then have an app that looks for any new photos on the FTP server and brings them into a Watched folder on the HD for either computer. Then I use a plugin in Lightroom that automatically imports the photo to Lr, applies Metadata and Develop presets and also automatically put the photo in a synced collection. There by I can view, or tweet or instagram the photo right from my iPhone instantly now matter where in the world I am at the time. It takes about 3 minutes from the time I take the picture til the time is shows up in Lightroom mobile. The problem is that is I can only sync one catalog and thus I have to choose to sync the iMac or the macbook and thus shutting out one half of my business model.
LR mobile: need more than one catalog syncing at a time with Adobe Cloud. I often have multiple projects in process at the same time . Inconvenient to combine catalogs just for mobile.
I would LOVE the ability to sync more than one catalog at a time. I keep my family/personal photos in one catalog (and a totally different drive for that matter) and my freelance work related stuff in a totally different catalog. I typically keep the work related stuff synced so I can show it to potential clients right on my Android tablet (yes I said Android, feel free to remember that base of users Adobe and roll out the changes on par with iOS not 9 months later) but it would be nice to be able to access family moments as well. Perhaps when Lightroom launches on my android device you first get a screen with "Catalog A, B C, etc" tap on the catalog you would like to look at and it pulls it up. I don't know much about the programming aspect of it, but it seems that having that "top layer" where you are selecting which catalog you are working with from the start would make it simple enough. I am totally fine with having to close one catalog and open another if need be, just let me access multiple catalogs.
My question is can Lr connect and sync with both a mobile catalog and a local catalog? For example, I take some photos, download them to my Surface Pro 3 for storage and initial processing, then upload them to Lr Mobile. When I get back to my desktop, then connect to Lr Mobile and import the photos into my main catalog. This would save having to export to a catalog on my SP3 and then import into my main catalog. It saves a step and takes advantage of Lr Mobiles capabilities.
Furthermore, Light Mobile for iOS allows you to take pictures using DNG capture. The caveat, is you must be running iOS 10 and have a 12MP camera (i.e. iPhone 6s/6s Plus and newer).
I agree with the comment that it really shouldn't matter where the shared collection comes from. The cloud storage should function just like OneDrive and can be accessed and synced by any catalog from any device.
Lightroom Mobile and Web are at heart, cloud based technology. I'd expect that multiple catalogs would also be this way as Adobe have used this before, as Madison Bond points out in an earlier post, within Adobe Revel's high-res cloud storage (albeit they were called Libraries in what was pretty much Lr Mobile's predecessor).
If Adobe could implement this within their cloud based Lightroom options then it will be interesting to see how this integrates within Lightroom Desktop and multiple catalogs there.
I've been using Lightroom professionally for about 8 years now, and have loved the developments I have seen in it. That said, I found it very hard for me to use Lightroom as a single catalog system because performance and storage become a real problem. I use a fully loaded Surface Pro 4 for all of my photo and video processing, and I'm often mobile. I carry external hard drives and use a separate catalog for each job I do. This gives me the best performance and storage solution.
The thing I miss is the ability to pick up my tablet and work on an edit when using a full computer setup is not practical. My hope is that Adobe finds a way to fully leverage the cloud. It would be awesome if I could publish a catalog or collection to my cloud account, allowing me to seamlessly work on the go. I don't think I'm alone in my crazy start/stop schedule, and this kind of thing would help me to be really productive.
I love Lightroom, but really don't think it has really leveraged the cloud well. In fact, Lightroom really doesn't point to my Creative Cloud storage very easily. I have to drill down to the location of it on disk, rather than just simply point to Creative Cloud to import images. I hope Lightroom CC 2017 has better ways to leverage the cloud. That is what I need most.
I work with a Mac desktop and a Mac Book Pro laptop. I use a separate catalog on each computer. I have not found a good way to blend my photos. I was hoping that Lightroom Mobile would be a solution. So far I am only using Lightroom Mobile on my Desktop Catalog. I was going to try adding photos from my laptop so I came to this conversation for advise.
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