Participant

Answered

Share Lightroom CC Library between accounts

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
February 20, 2019
5 replies
18058 views

Hi Adobe, friends and helpful people out there!

I have the most annoying problem at the moment. We're a group of 10 employees working on separate computers with a photos in Lightroom CC. Each and everyone has their own Adobe-account.

The problem:
We all want to have one single and same Lightroom Library where we need to be able to add photos, edit and contribute in the same library from different computers.

Question 1:
Right now - there's (as far as I understand) no feature allowing me to invite several Adobe-accounts to one and same library to edit, create and change photos? @Adobe - will you help me to confirm?

Question 2 (The option we're forced to have)

Right now, the only option we seemed forced to have (not even scalable solution) is to have one Adobe-account creating the Library. Then to be able to access the photos from different computers we need to log in to the same Adobe-account to be able to access that specific library.

Unfortunately we can only have 2 computers logged in at the same time on the same account. A solution would be if they allowed me to increase the number (to 10, as we are 10 in the group) of users allowed on the same account.

The second solution would be if there is any feature to invite different accounts to the same library with capabilities to edit, add photos, create etc.

Adobe, or anyone else! Please give me advice!

I can't be the only one with this problem? Do you guys have any idea on how to solve it?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Charlie.D

Hello @nfian and @Timothy.Spear

Lightroom now allows paid users to invite other people to collaborate (add and edit photos) in shared albums -- your friends, family, colleagues etc can now help contribute new photos or even help edit photos inside your shared albums. People you invite do not need to be paid Lightroom users -- the album owner's paid subscription provides access to every member of the shared album. Privileges are set per-person in the shared album's settings, so some people may only view the album while others may be real partners and collaborators. This helps avoid the need for sharing the same login amongst a group of people, if one doesn't want to share every photo or video in one's own catalog/account or risk losing data through other people's actions.

Note that when using LR Mobile or Desktop or Web apps to collaborate, free users will be able to view photos, or view + add photos, or view + add+ edit photos. However, free users will still lack access to premium features, which may limit their editing abilities.

For more info, see: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/save-share-photos.html

N

nfian

Participant

Waiting for Adobe to implement this feature too.

In the meantime, my team's workaround is to use a shared lightroom catalog via the web app. It's nearly as functional as the desktop app, using a different google/chrome user to sign in with the shared adobe team account and then using chrome's "create shortcut" tool to spin it off as a standalone web app. This allows us to have our own lightroom catalogs and our team catalog open at the same time.

C

Charlie.D

Correct answer

Community Manager

Hello @nfian and @Timothy.Spear

Lightroom now allows paid users to invite other people to collaborate (add and edit photos) in shared albums -- your friends, family, colleagues etc can now help contribute new photos or even help edit photos inside your shared albums. People you invite do not need to be paid Lightroom users -- the album owner's paid subscription provides access to every member of the shared album. Privileges are set per-person in the shared album's settings, so some people may only view the album while others may be real partners and collaborators. This helps avoid the need for sharing the same login amongst a group of people, if one doesn't want to share every photo or video in one's own catalog/account or risk losing data through other people's actions.

Note that when using LR Mobile or Desktop or Web apps to collaborate, free users will be able to view photos, or view + add photos, or view + add+ edit photos. However, free users will still lack access to premium features, which may limit their editing abilities.

For more info, see: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/save-share-photos.html

J

Joy22418499mblm

Participating Frequently

You want a professional digital assest manager. Lr does not come close to that, it realy has very basic DAM functionality with fairly robust image editing tools.

You should be looking at tools like:

https://www.photools.com/

The old product was called iMatch; I have not paid attention to keep up with the correct product name for multi-user.

Tim

Thanks for the suggestion. It looks like imatch is only for Windows? we have a mix of Windows and Macs in our environment. We are trying to avoid paying for additional services since we are already paying for the full Creative Cloud for multiple users, so was hoping to find an Adobe solution. We'll see how far bridge will get us, since it at least supports multi-user caches https://helpx.adobe.com/bridge/using/centrally-manage-bridge-cache.html

Makes me sad we cant use Lightroom for this, but the editing tools arn't realy needed for this use case.

selondon

Community Expert

Adobe Revel was Lightroom CC's Cloud Based Photo Storage forerunner.

Although a lot more basic than CC, it did have Multiple Collaborative Libraries (the equivalent of Catalogs).

I'd love to see a similar feature in CC and you can vote for them here if you want:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-ecosystem-cloud-based-ideas/p-multiple-collaborative-catalogs-libraries/idi-p/12240119

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Jao vdL

Community Expert

You can't do this from computers (as opposed to mobile devices where you have far more devices that can access the same account. Unfortunately this is even true for the team plan. It will not share lightroom CC libraries across accounts as far as I know. It can share all the other cloud stuff but not Lightroom CC which is the odd duck out. Technically this is not much different from accessing the same account on multiple devices and computers and so all the hard work has been done. Adobe just never enabled it for sharing libraries across accounts. Amazingly, Apple photos and Google photos can do this just fine but not Lightroom.

H

henrikgrundenAuthor

Participant

Thank you Jao! I unfortunately think you're right. Hopefully Adobe will understand the need of this as content producers, photographers and companies will have a great value of sharing albums together.

I think we might stick with iCloud Photos (Apple) for now until I hear something other from Adobe.

Abambo

Community Expert

The only "multi user" photo editing software from Adobe is Bridge with Camera Raw processing. What is missing there is the database. That is how we organise our photo work.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

Abambo

Community Expert

I do not think that Lightroom CC is a multi-user program.This would involve some locking work, simultaneous data base access etc.

In addition your workaround solution violates the terms of use of your Lightroom license if I'm correctly informed, as the license well allows for 2 concurrent activations but only one active user at the same time.

Moving from File Hosting, Syncing, and Collaboration to Lightroom CC — The cloud-based photo service, as this seams to be a Lightroom sharing question and not a general file sharing question.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

H

henrikgrundenAuthor

Participant

Hello Abambo

Thanks for your reply.

In my world the strength of most cloud-based services is to involve multiple users to collaborate in a workspace. Seems kind of to be the idea of a cloud concept as far as I'm concerned.

But my question still remains... is it possible to upgrade the license with increased number of users for one single account, that would basically solve the problem for us.

And secondly, there are no features allowing other adobe users to access the library?

Thanks!