Lightroom Use in a school Network

[kelly_roach]

I have  searched thru the forums unsuccessfully to find an answer to how to use Adobe Lightroom in a high school setting. I have a Photography course that started this September. I know and enjoy Lightroom for editing photographs and want to pass this along to my students. Like almost all schools we are on a network and the C:drives are locked to student access. All their access and file storage being on networked drives which of course Lightroom will not create a catalog on. We tried saving catalogs to USB drives and that has had very mixed success . Has anybody found a way of using Lightroom in a school setting with locked local hard drives?

[Kat Gilbert]

Moved to Lightroom. The lounge is not for technical questions. If you find this is not the right forum- please let us know so that we can better locate someone who can help!

[Kat Gilbert]

Moved to Lr but realize this is not the correct area so hopefully someone can move to the correct location that deals with your issue...

[Abambo]

install a virtual D: drive on C: that is writable. This will work.

[cmgap]

Have you tested this? It is a question that comes up frequently...

[Abambo]

yes! It's our config. A locked down C: drive but a virtual D: drive that is writable.

[cmgap]

What if 'D' isn't available? Can you add a virtual drive at any time? I'm looking for instructions online... can  you post a how to link here?

[Abambo]

As of your request:

Creating Virtual Hard Disks

[Abambo]

...and this: Understanding and working with VHD and VHDX files

[cmgap]

Thanks - wonder if other schools are using this as a solution to sharing one Lightroom catalog among many students. Where is your school?

[Abambo]

It's not a school. It's a company with 1500 employees around the world and a small group of Adobe CC users (6 to be precise, but that are 2 more then a year before). Computers are managed by the IT. I'm just a poor user who cannot write on C:, but (mis)uses the virtual disk to store the Lightroom catalog...

[cmgap]

This is cool. Would love to hear from other organizations using this method. It makes sense and if it works would solve the op's question of how to share one catalog across multiple users. Thanks for the links.

[kelly_roach]

Thank you so much for the suggestion. I will talk to our school district techs about this option. We would not have one shared catalog for the entire class though but separate catalogs for each student to store their individual Lr work in. would the virtual disc work for them?

[Abambo]

You can't share catalogs. Lr is a strict single user application. That's the reason for Lr to be so strict with network locations. The users working around this with cloud storage like Dropbox or Google drive are risking the concistency of the database in case of synchronization not going as expected.

[Abambo]

And yes, the virtual disk would work for them. As it is implemented at our site, the virtual disk is available for all users of that machine. This means that who ever has access to the computer may access the disk and the data. But I suspect, that there are also follow me solutions, ie where the disk (content) follows the owners computer. Don't ask me, however, how this could be done. It' 20 years ago that I did lastly system management and that was on Unix machines.