Anyone else use Lightroom on Windows AND Mac?

[jammy_c]

Hey you awesome lot!

So, I have just agreed to buy a 2nd hand (2 year old) 27" iMac, and I have never used one before properly. I'm very excited about it and I know it's going to be great for editing photos.

At the moment I have a windows laptop and have been using Lightroom 3 for some time for post-processing.

I would ideally like to install a copy of Lightroom on the Mac, and be able to save all of my image files/lightroom catalogues to a portable USB hard drive from now on and change between the two whenever I want, seemlessly.

I want to be able to edit on the Mac, unplug the HDD and take the laptop to a client to show the images to or continue editing in LR on the go.

Does anyone else do this? Can you see any pitfalls that i've overlooked or should I be able to do what I want?

Regards in advance
James.

 

[neil_g]

i dont think it will work. windows uses a drive letter pathing structure and the mac does not. how this path to the images is recorded in the cat i do not know.

although there is a article here - http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/catalog-faq-lightroom.html - which says "To transfer a catalog between a Windows computer and a Mac, copy your catalog, preview, and image files from the original computer onto a flash or other external drive. Then, attach that drive to the second computer and copy the files to the desired location on the second computer." whether this will achieve what you require is another matter.

even if it did work youll need a common file system for starters. FAT32 probably isnt ideal, especially for a large catalogue with potential to grow to 4gb+. personally id use NTFS and you can either enable NTFS writing on the Mac via terminal (google is your friend) or install a 3rd party app. whether LR would be happy with that im not sure, LR was never designed for cat sharing. remember to take regular cat backups as they are easily corrupted.

 

[jammy_c]

Cheers Neil, that's some good information. (If not a bit disheartening)

 

[ancient_mariner]

I have used a Macbook for mobile editing/backup & then transferred the images (and edits) across to a windows laptop, but it's not a seamless process and there were corruption issues transferring the catalogue from one to t'other.

My experience is that while LR (and other apps) work the same in both, the underlying systems are different enough to not make life easy.

 

[Chappers]

When I moved from PC to Mac I simply copied my Lightroom catalogue files to the external hard drive that had all the images on. The hard drive was NTFS formatted, and I had NTFS for Mac on the mac. From memory I had no trouble with Lightroom running the images form the external hard drive using the hard drive catalogue.. I did shortly after transfer the catalogue to the Mac. but initially it worked. Can't remember what version of Lightroom but I suspect it was about ver 2. Might be worth making a small temporary catalogue, with some images and see if it works.

As Windows and Macs handle drives in a different way you may need to relink to the drive from Lightroom each time you move. This may end up causing errors if you do it a number of times.