Lightroom 3 Catalogue sharing help!

AshleyC

AshleyC

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Ive my main PC and a laptop both running Windows 7 and lightroom 3. I want to be able to share the catalog on my main pc so i have set up the homegroup thing in windows and shared out both the catalog folder and my photos folder with read/write access on the homegroup on the PC.

I can see these folders and files on my laptop when i browse to them.

But when i load up Lightoom on the laptop, go to open catalogue and browse to the catalogue file i get a "Lightroom cannot launch with this catalog. It is either on a network volume or on a volume which Lightroom cannot save changes"

But ive set up the sharing to be read/write so cant see what more i can do.

Has anyone done a similar thing and got round this problem?

thanks in advance.
 
Lightroom does not support catalogue sharing, in fact adobe go as far as to strongly recommend against it due to corruption issues. Hence you can't put the cat on a network drive.

Reading a thread on here the other day probably the best way to get around it would be to have 2 separate cats and use the export and import cat options.
 
technics100 said:
I ran it fine with a similar setup by keeping the catalogue in my Dropbox folder.. I wrote a tutorial here..

http://adammcateer.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/running-lightroom-on-two-computers-with-one-catalogue/
Click to expand...

to be honest i think thats risky.

if your internet drops out while writing to the cat, then its corrupt. its the same reason adobe dont let you put it on a network drive, if there is packet loss the cat is toast.

this is the method adobe suggest for 2 machines and 1 cat..

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/333/333736...le_computers__such_as_a_laptop_and_a_desktop_
 
Export & Import is my preferred method, as Neil says, sharing and networking your catalog is not recommend.
I create collections and export as a catalog, take a look at this thread and the post by Alan Garrett who gives a step by step guide which you may find useful:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3319106

Steve
 
An alternative would be to have all your images and your Lightroom catalog on a USB drive. Bit messy unplugging and reconnecting each time you changed computers but it would maintain the integrity of the catalog and the images.

However I must admit when I need to do this I use Neil's method, which I find the most reliable
 
thanks for the links peeps. I did think about the external drive thing but i just assumed performance would be awful unless you had a usb 3.0 drive or something and my PC doesnt have 3.0 ports. The upgrade in a couple of weeks will though.

What a pain in the bum though, youd think they would base this gorgeous bit of software on a slightly more robust database model! Even MS Access, which notoriously vandalises itself if you look at it funny, could handle being on a shared drive!

Ah well, maybe in LR 4.0 :) They have to keep some features held back for people to buy the upgrade!
 
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essexash said:
What a pain in the bum though, youd think they would base this gorgeous bit of software on a slightly more robust database model! Even MS Access, which notoriously vandalises itself if you look at it funny, could handle being on a shared drive!

Ah well, maybe in LR 4.0 :) They have to keep some features held back for people to buy the upgrade!
Click to expand...

i would absolutely love native catalogue sharing
 
I'll be honest I don't find it an issue too much asI don't keep the same work on both PC's. I have my work one and home one and just import/export catalogues as required between the two.

The impostant thing is to make sure everything is backed up, catalogue, cache & raw files.
 
I wrote a tutorial about how to do it on the mac. This stores all the images on a network drive and the catalogue on an img drive which is like a zip file that opens into a mappable drive so looks the same to each computer. Never had any issues with it but I do back up regularly.

Not sure how this would translate to WIndows but the reason you can't do it by Window's normal mapping is that there is a flag in the registry for every drive which specifies if this 'drive' is on a network. Adobe's software checks for this and rejects any 'drive' of this type. Img drives don't have any way of saying 'I am on x network'.

I did get it working on LR2 under Windows but never tried it on LR3.
 
I forgot to add that the img file which creates the drive is on the network. Each computer just needs to have a shortcut to the catalogue file which is inside the img file. MacOS automatically opens the img file's drive and then locks it so no other computer get open it. The tutorial is on TP somewhere but I'm on my phone at the moment.
 
neil_g said:
to be honest i think thats risky.

if your internet drops out while writing to the cat, then its corrupt. its the same reason adobe dont let you put it on a network drive, if there is packet loss the cat is toast.

this is the method adobe suggest for 2 machines and 1 cat..

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/333/333736...le_computers__such_as_a_laptop_and_a_desktop_
Click to expand...

I did this at work until recently. The catalogue is actually stored locally and a copy is uploaded to the dropbox server so you're only ever writing to the local file - there's no more chance of it corrupting than it being in a regular folder.

I believe Dropbox uses a lan sync so although it uploads a copy to the web, if both computers are on they should sync via local network to speed up things a little. And if you do happen to have the file open on two computers at once and they're both writing to it, it detects it and saves alternate versions.
 
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