2 laptops, one set of adjustments

[gpc1]

Hi all,

I have a question and after doing a fair few searches I’m still unable to get an easy clear answer and step by step guide.

I am running 2 laptops at the moment. A macbook pro and an acer.
I have lightroom 3 on each
I have 2 hard drives each with different raw files on them but will be consolidating this to one drive and removing any raw files that are no longer required.
My question is,
Is it possible to sync the adjustments I have made across both laptops so that regardless of the laptop I plug the hard drive into, it will contain all the most recent adjustments to each set of raw files?

Hope that makes sense,
Ta
Gpc

 

[Chappers]

The adjustment you have made are stored within the Lightroom catalogue. So if both machine read the same catalogue, they will display the same result. Now if you store the catalogue complete with previews on a single external drive and allow both laptops to use that catalogue you will get both to use the same adjustments.

The good news is the catalogue and the previews are the same for both Mac and PC. So either will read the same catalogue. I did this when I converted from PC to Mac. Note the drive must be connected via USB or Firewire. A network drive won't work to store the catalogue.

You will also have to amalgamate both catalogues.You have several options,you could try the following.

Move the larger of the two catalogues , complete with the preview data to the new external drive, along with all the images. Then Use the "update Folder Location" option to identify the new image location . If the images are referenced against a root directory, then all you have to do is select that and Lightroom should update all its information for all the images you moved. (I'd suggest you copy them across, in case anything happens in the transfer process. You could just get Lightroom to do it, but with a lot of files the copy option is the safest as you still have the originals in their original location if anything goes wrong.. It happened to me once)

Use the "Export as Catalogue" option the smaller of the two . This allows you to produce a temporary catalogue, with the adjustments and the previews. Move the full size images to an appropriate location on the new drive. Use the "Import Catalogue" option to import the data to larger of the two catalogues, and use the "Update Folder Location" option to identify where the images are on the new drive. Alternatively you could "Export Catalogue with negatives" this copies all the data including the original full res files. Transfer this to the new drive and "Import Catalogue". This option does take a bit more time as Lightroom has to effectively write the images to the catalogue, and import them again.

You may need to tidy things up a little to get everything in place but it beats starting from scratch