How best to set up Lightroom with two PCs and a NAS?

StewartR

StewartR

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Stewart
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I recently moved all my photos onto a NAS. But I'd like to be able to access them via Lightroom using two PCs - my big desktop and my laptop. How best do I go about this?

Currently my Lightroom catalogue is on the desktop PC. My inclination is to synch that with a cloud service such as DropBox, and then set up another synch between DropBox and the laptop. Then I'd have copies of the catalogue on both PCs, and any changes I made using one of them would percolate through to the other.

Would that work? I think it should. It's basically what I do for work, whereby some important files are stored in DropBox and synched to both my office PC and my laptop. (I don't need to be able to switch from one PC to the other quickly, so I can cope with synchronisation being non-instantaneous.)

Or maybe I should just put the catalogue on the NAS too. I believe I can't put the catalogue on a mapped network drive. But I think I ought to be able to use the QNAP synch utility (QSync), which which works like DropBox. The synch folder would be on my C: drive, so I'd have thought Lightroom would be happy with a catalogue there.

Any advice / recommendations? Anything important that I've overlooked?
 
Doesn't directly answer your question but I use Remote Desktop from my laptop to the desktop for LR. That way I get the processing power of the desktop but can work on the laptop.
 
sirch said:
Doesn't directly answer your question but I use Remote Desktop from my laptop to the desktop for LR. That way I get the processing power of the desktop but can work on the laptop.
Click to expand...


I have done something similar, in that I logged on to my home tower PC from my office in my lunch break to do some LightRoom editing.
One must love Technology !
 
I have setup two ISCSI drives on my NAS one for LR catalogs and the other for my Photo Library. As they are ISCSI windows sees that as an attached drive and the catalog works just fine.
Few thing i found out along the way:
Make sure you setup multipath IO or you will get corruption issues
Using the built in Windows 10 initiator to connect to the drives on which ever pc I am using and make sure you disconnect from the other first.
Sometime when you switch LR can see the folder where the images are stored, this is just simple to fix by using find missing folder.


hope this makes sense
 
LIghtroom isn't really designed to have the catalogue run over a network. You could I guess move the photos on import to the NAS and have the preview files generated locally, but that still won't sync accross.

What I've done is use an external USB 3/C 2 TB SSD which I use for my current years work. The Catalogue and images are on there. Every night I have a scheduled task that backs up both to my NAS. On the NAS I have another catalogue for ALL my images and each year I import the current year to the big catalogue. I don't tend to need previous years work and if I do I can live with the sluggishness over the LAN. Having the current work on an external drive means I can quickly swap it between my Dekstop PC and my macbook that I use when away,

I've run some diskmark tests against the external disk and its the same data transfer rate as my internal SSD's and only slightly slower than my M2 PCI drive.

Oh and the whole lot syncs up to amazon photos... or it did until I discovered that CR3 raw files (Canon R5) arn;t included in the free images quota (CR2 files are)
 
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Depends on your NAS mines using 2.5G (I get speeds around 310Mbs) and I have an SSD in the NAS for anything I want to be fast.
 
Just found this thread as I've finished moving my photos and LR catalogs onto a speedy NAS with 1000 MB/s only to find for Lightroom, the catalogs themselves cannot be on a network drive. I'd prefer to get around this and not have to store the catalogs on an SSD. Any ideas for a Mac?
 
LongLensPhotography said:
Your catalog goes on to fast removable drive. Pretty much any SSD or NVME will do. Been doing that for years and years.
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This is exactly how I've been doing it for years and it works great.
All images stored on my NAS, my Lightroom catalogues are on my fast Samsung external SSD, it's plugged into my iMac but I can unplug it and connect it to my MacBook and work in Lightroom.
 
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