Access over the network - all photos...how?

[rgrebby]

Ive always been interested in speed of access when it comes to files and using lightroom. For this reason I use internal SATA drives to hold my photograph library. Recently ive moved over to USB3 so that my previous years are on external drives so that my computer box stays clean and empty.

Im using my laptop a whole lot more as the new studio is up at the top of the house and im downstairs in the evening.

What I want to do is to access my lightroom library and photos over the network, wirelessly.

The reason why ive not done this in the past is that im worried about is speed.

I run a 5Dmk2 so have large files, I also do high mb psd's so is there a method to have very quick network access from both my desktop and laptop computer with either being turned on.

 

[flossie]

Lightroom allows you to store your photographs on any shared folder (ie. on the network somewhere... be it on a particular computer, NAS, etc etc). Speed obviously depends on your network, which if Gigabyte is effectively instant, Wireless will appear to chug more...but as you are currently using USB, you will be used to slow transfers!

BUT you can't share the lightroom catalogue. :bang: So the only way to have multiple computers working on the same files is to do the tedious Export Catalogue and Import Catalogue malarky.

p.s.
I believe that Lightroom speed is more to do with size of catalogue & RAM than anything else...

 

[rgrebby]

Lightroom allows you to store your photographs on any shared folder (ie. on the network somewhere... be it on a particular computer, NAS, etc etc). Speed obviously depends on your network, which if Gigabyte is effectively instant, Wireless will appear to chug more...but as you are currently using USB, you will be used to slow transfers!

BUT you can't share the lightroom catalogue. :bang: So the only way to have multiple computers working on the same files is to do the tedious Export Catalogue and Import Catalogue malarky.

p.s.
I believe that Lightroom speed is more to do with size of catalogue & RAM than anything else...

I use USB3 which is anything but slow I believe the max is 5GBps. its easily as fast as the internal drives.

You can load the same library from different computers so im unsure what you mean by you cant share it.

What speed will a gigabyte network do?

 

[arad85]

What speed will a gigabyte network do?

That'll be gigabit network.

Copying to/from windows machines I get 30-50Mbytes/sec depending on disk. It won't be as fast as local -which is closer to 100Mbytes/sec (the limiting factor will be drive speed, not intereconnect speed here)...

 

[rgrebby]

Ah thanks Andy for correcting. Maybe its not possible to do this. I guess one option is to have my main computer hard wired to a NAS drive with all the lightroom libs and then connect wirelessly to that NAS with the laptop. It will be slow over the wireless but at least I can work.

An easy option would be to have the desktop turned on and them map the drives so I can access them via the laptop but thats not exactly what I was hoping to do.

 

[neil_g]

You can load the same library from different computers so im unsure what you mean by you cant share it.

you can. BUT adobe highly recommend against it.

the database does not have any share capability, i.e record locking so it is extremely easy to corrupt the catalogue.

also LR wont let you put the cat on a network drive (you can fool it).