Lightroom catalogue on two machines

tomah

tomah

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I'm just wondering if there's a tutorial on this somewhere, or if someone can give some guidance.

I have two Apple machines, and iMac and a recently acquired Air.

At present, all my images are on the iMac with a backup to an external HD.

Is it possible access my images and make edits from my Air? Or, to place my Lightroom images in a folder that will allow me to make edits on both machines without have to transfer files?

I know you're able to 'file share' between Macs quite easily, but can you use that facility to do what I want to do with Lightroom?
 
You can share it but it is not recommended. The best way would probably to use your external HD as the main storage space / catalogue as you can then just plug it in to whichever machine you want to use at that time.

There are various instructions on the interweb to show how to share using a nas device etc, but as said this is not recommended.
 
. Might be a bit slow running over wifi generating the previews due to pulling the RAW files over from one machine to the other. Can you connect an air with a network cable?
if you had both machines running LR at the same time that would obviously cause problems.
Might just be worth exporting a small catalogue to your air. takes longer to do but seems simpler in the long run.
 
The problem is that it is not just file sharing with Lightroom, there is also a database to contend with.

When I used a MacBook along with my iMac I kept the main catalog on the iMac and exported/created temporary catalogs to use on my MacBook to work on the road, then reimported the temporary catalogs back into the main one.
 
There are a number of older threads on this that go into the details etc. if you do a search you should find them.
 
I have my LR catalog and photos on an external drive as I currently use two machines to work on my photos.

As LR is built around a database it is very protective re it's integrity so you can't host it on a NAS drive as an example.

The above process works fine with the only drawback being that I have to have the ext drive plugged in and transfer rates are not as quick as an internal drive.
 
Buck said:
I have my LR catalog and photos on an external drive as I currently use two machines to work on my photos.

As LR is built around a database it is very protective re it's integrity so you can't host it on a NAS drive as an example.

The above process works fine with the only drawback being that I have to have the ext drive plugged in and transfer rates are not as quick as an internal drive.
Click to expand...

You can host the RAW files on a NAS drive as long as the catalogue file is on a local drive. That's waht dropbox does as the .lcat file is located in c:/my documents
 
technics100 said:
You can host the RAW files on a NAS drive as long as the catalogue file is on a local drive. That's waht dropbox does as the .lcat file is located in c:/my documents
Click to expand...

If you run MacOS you can stick the image files on the ext drive as normal files and have the dmg file containing the library on the same ext drive and just mount it as you move from machine to machine. Unfortunately Windows registry has a flag to say "NETWORK" drive or not which Lightroom looks for and so the hack doesn't work on Windows.
 
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