PC and Mac using same external HD to access photos

Craigus

Craigus

Suspended / Banned
Messages
1,562
Name
Craig
Edit My Images
Yes
Having only purchased Lightroom & Photoshop through Adobe CC recently I would like to get my file storage set up correctly before I get too far and accumulate too many files.

I have a PC set up in my study and a Macbook Pro that floats around the house, what I would ideally like is a NAS drive in the study where I store all my RAW files so that I can use either the PC or laptop to do editing on.

Has anybody else got a similar set up with photos being shared between the two platforms?
Any issues?
How would Lightroom handle this?
Presumably changes I make to RAW files on one machine wouldn't appear on the other as that data is stored locally on the machine?

Thanks for any advice you can give.
 
you'd have a lightroom catalogue per machine so yes as you say although the RAW files are stored on the NAS the local cat holds all of the edits.

you would have to do import and exports of the catalogues if you wanted edits on both machines (unsure whether mac cats are compatible with win cats).

otherwise it should be fine. a good NAS will handle SMB and AFP. be aware that ideally you want a good gig wired LAN for this sort of set up, wireless will always be compromised for speed.
 
I have had trouble with PCs reading Mac held files transferred to a stick. I overcame the problem by reformatting the stick to Fat32 rather than the Mac standard. The problem doesn't seem to exist going the other way with the Mac happily reading FAT32 files from the PC.
Just thought this might be relevant, for what it's worth.
 
Thanks for your reply.

Do you mean that the NAS should be wired so as not to impact the speed? Most editing would be done on the PC which is wired too but the laptop of course will be moving around so wireless connection to the NAS which I accept will be slower.

I'm hoping not to have to spend too much on the NAS, will most, if not all handle the two protocols okay or is it likely that I'll need a more expensive/better quality one? Only looking 2-3 TB size wise.
 
Clactonian said:
I have had trouble with PCs reading Mac held files transferred to a stick. I overcame the problem by reformatting the stick to Fat32 rather than the Mac standard. The problem doesn't seem to exist going the other way with the Mac happily reading FAT32 files from the PC.
Just thought this might be relevant, for what it's worth.
Click to expand...

Apparently OSX can now read files from NTFS formatted storage, but not write to storage using that format. FAT32 is the 'universal' format, although with a limit of 4GB per file IIRC which shouldn't be a problem for regular images. Both platforms can probably use each others preferred format through the use of add-on software.
 
Clactonian said:
I have had trouble with PCs reading Mac held files transferred to a stick. I overcame the problem by reformatting the stick to Fat32 rather than the Mac standard. The problem doesn't seem to exist going the other way with the Mac happily reading FAT32 files from the PC.
Just thought this might be relevant, for what it's worth.
Click to expand...

shouldnt be an issue on a NAS, it will hold its own file system which is accessible by all platforms.

ancient_mariner said:
Apparently OSX can now read files from NTFS formatted storage, but not write to storage using that format. FAT32 is the 'universal' format, although with a limit of 4GB per file IIRC which shouldn't be a problem for regular images. Both platforms can probably use each others preferred format through the use of add-on software.
Click to expand...

you can enable NTFS write via terminal, been an option for several versions. exFAT would be better than FAT32 because of the 4gb limitation.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top