Editing on Lightroom when away from home

roc1

roc1

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Ok so I have a busy summer with weddings, and on some occassions I have situations where I shoot a wedding, and then the following day go away for a few weeks with my other job. There is a good amount of downtime on this job away so would want to make good use of that time by being able to edit weddings.

I was going to get a high spec macbook pro 15" retina for this task but here is where my question lies. My home set up is catalog on imac and an ingest of raws into an external drive backing up to a NAS. When I'm away is there a way of being able to access the image files remotely via the NAS to edit them or would it be easier to make another copy to a rugged external drive and then take that with me along with the macbook? Once I get home from the job away I could then upload from the rugged external to the main external attached to the imac?

Sorry, a bit arsed about face with this but sure there must be a way to do this with too much of a headache!?

Cheers!
 
I think the best way would be to store your catalog and images on an external drive.

I'm sure Adobe have a reason it's not been done so far, but being able to sync Lightroom catalogs between multiple computers is something they need to start doing.
 
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I would imagine having remote access to your NAS may be a bit complicated. Some NAS have this built in otherwise you'd need to install and set up some sort of VPN access to your home network.

Copying images to an additional drive may be the most flexible, easiest and fastest as it's all local and you don't depend on network speeds. When it comes to catalogs then you'll have to be careful as you'll need to make sure you don't mess up your versioning, if you take your copy on the external drive or laptop and then make changes to it and the one at home then that could be an issue. Depending on how you organise your catalogs this may be easier or more complicated (the smaller and more specific the easier it will be to keep track).
 
Cool thanks for the replies! Any good recommendations for a drive to take away with me? 1tb should be enough i think.
 
neil_g said:
two copies of LR, one on each machine. export as catalog between machines.

be wary of so called "rugged" drives, they're often not for the price premium.
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Do you need to export? Would a drag and drop of the catalog file to the new disk not work?


roc1 said:
Cool thanks for the replies! Any good recommendations for a drive to take away with me? 1tb should be enough i think.
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I use this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Sli...F8&qid=1396016015&sr=8-1&keywords=samsung+1tb

Does the job.
 
I have a new cat for each wedding I do.

So basically if I shot 'max and sarah's' wedding, i then create a cat on the main imac with their names, and then do the same on the portable drive. Ingest into the portable, edit when away, and then import from the portable into the main cat on the imac when i return?
 
I think Neil's suggestion is the best one - I've been looking into this myself as I work up to buying a Dell Venue Pro 8 tablet which is tiny, has limited storage but with the digitiser would be a nice portable editor for holidays.
For the external drive, again as Neil says, a lot of the "rugged" ones aren't - Lacie, I'm looking at you.
I'd probably go for an SSD instead of a mechanical drive as there's no moving parts and so less susceptible to physical damage.
 
Keeping two library s in sync could be a problem. You could export the originals from your desktop, as a catalog and then import this onto your laptop. The laptop would have any adjustments you made on that version. Editing on the lap top would mean you would need to reimport onto your desktop, but with a different name. You could then delete the orriginal images from your imac. You would then have your edited images on your iMac with the edits. It's roundabout way of working though.

Personally Id go with the urbanclown's idea and store everything initially on an external drive. ( preferably on two drives, one you keep at home ). Only exporting them , as a catalogue, to the iMac when the job is done and dusted.

I think using as NAS will be very slow, and I don't think Lightroom will allow you to access the library over a network, although I think Cowasaki did find a way to do it.

As far as drives are concerned I have both a LaCie Rugged and a conventional Tosh 1 Tb usb3 drive. The Tosh lives hapilly in my laptop bag with no problems. The LaCie hasn't given any problems either.

As far as the MacBook Pro is concerned. I've had a Retina model since they first came out. It's far more accurate than my old (2008) MBP even when calibrated, straight out of the box. I would recommend running a calibration on it though ( as I would the iMac) .
 
Why not use smart previews (assuming lr5). It's exactly this situation they were designed for and no need to keep multiple libraries in sync or have the originals with you at all
 
Didn't know about smart previews, I use LR4, but that does sound like doing the trick! You'd need to look at what to do if you don't use Dropbox but worst case a careful copy and paste would do the trick!
 
This smart preview thing looks like a great option! I was about to sign up to crashplan as a cloud backup service which is about 4$ a month. Would I be able to use that instead of Dropbox for putting the LR cat on or would it be easier to have it on dropbox (which is $10 a month)?

Thanks!
 
I use Crashplan but it works differently to Dropbox, dropbox is great to both backup and also sync across machines. Crashplan is a backup tool, it will backup your data but won't be sync'ed across devices so they're different things. Also, Crashplan is slower at identifying changes and backing them up than Dropbox in my experience so that could also be an issue when operating on catalogs.
 
ok thanks i'll opt for dropbox in addition to crashplan then i reckon
 
Yes, I think that's a good idea, use Dropbox for working files you need to sync and crashplan as your offsite backup. But we aware, my backup took like 2 months to be completed, I get upload speeds that don't exceed 700Mbs so you do the math.
 
I use Smartpreview and store my original photos on an external drive. i load them initially onto my macbook then copy them with drag and drop to external drive. The smart preview is really effective.
 
Does smart preview also work if you right-click in LR and choose "Edit in Photoshop CS6" and make further edits, or does it only work within LR?
 
I dont use photoshop actively. Lightroom 5 does what i need for the moment. I have ps at home and can tell you tonight once I try but i dont think it does as they work off different libraries as far as i can remember.
 
roc1 said:
ok thanks i'll opt for dropbox in addition to crashplan then i reckon
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For catalogues? I wouldn't. I posted in another thread yesterday (about Lightblue but it's still relevant) - Dropbox isn't designed for syncing databases like that. It will probably work but one day it may just corrupt your catalogue and that's will be a really bad day.

When I edit away from home I have raw files on external drive and catalogue on laptop drive. Before shutting down, I copy the catalogue to the external drive. Back home, drag the catalogue over to the desktop and tell it where the raws are. Since you are only ever working on one machine at once and have one cat per client there's no need for merging.
 
JonathanRyan said:
For catalogues? I wouldn't. I posted in another thread yesterday (about Lightblue but it's still relevant) - Dropbox isn't designed for syncing databases like that. It will probably work but one day it may just corrupt your catalogue and that's will be a really bad day.
Click to expand...
what he said. adobe never designed the LR catalogue to work on anything other than a single local drive. it will only take the sync to kick in while you are using the database to knacker it as there is no record locking built in etc.
 
I use a temp catalogue when i'm and about, or sitting in front of the TV, works well. MBP 15" retina with everything on the SSD for speed. I then have a USB 3 passport set up to back up that. I then merge the temp catalogue with my main one which sits on the iMac with an external drive as a back up. Once the project is finished I archive it and burn a copy of the finished images to a DVD just for security. This tutorial helps:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-compl...anne-kost/how-to-use-lightroom-5-on-location/

Also worth a watch for backup strategy is this one:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-complete-picture-with-julieanne-kost/lightroom-backup-strategies-5/

I have thought about a separate catalogue for projects as you can just archive these off, back them up and only worry about them if needed again at some point. Up to you really, do what fits in to your workflow, just make sure you back up!!!
 
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