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

StewartR

StewartR

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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?
 
Lightroom does not play nicely with shared catalogs.
 
So I tried (briefly) to run a LR course at our local college. It was a while ago though so I don't know if these still apply. I've been able to take student catalogues on a pen drive and plug them into my PC and run them fine. We had quite a few issues but I think these were mainly due to pansy ram on the college PCs. I ran it for 3 terms then packed it in because the IT problems were more trouble than they were worth.

Lightroom won't allow a catalogue on a network drive. Seems like a massive oversight to me as it could allow team collaboration on images but hey ho. Adobe.

If you do what you're planning (duplicating the catalogue to different places) you need to ensure the image location has the same mapping on the devices, so however you map the NAS on the desktop needs to be the same for the laptop (same drive letter).

Another option is to write the metadata back to the jpeg/raw/tiff/dng files but things like collections & flagging are part of the catalogue so these would be lost.
 
Perhaps try the Lightroom queen forum for such a detailed question.
 
Harlequin565 said:
If you do what you're planning (duplicating the catalogue to different places) you need to ensure the image location has the same mapping on the devices, so however you map the NAS on the desktop needs to be the same for the laptop (same drive letter).
Click to expand...
OK, understood. Ta.
 
StewartR said:
What is a "shared" catalog in this context?
Click to expand...
Accessing the same files from more than one Lightroom installation.

After 10 years of running both a desktop and a laptop and trying to get Lightroom to work, I'm ditching the desktop.
 
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