Photos on wireless HD, Lightroom on PC or laptop...?

aberal

aberal

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Alan
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Does anyone know whether it is possible to have your photos located on an external hard drive and accessed wirelessly from Lightroom on a PC or laptop? Can the catalog be set up to read the external HD? It would work for me to be able to store my photos on an external HD and access them from both PC or laptop, but something tells me this is beyond the capabilities of Lightroom, or indeed Photoshop.
 
I am guessing if you have a external networked drive mapped to a drive on your laptop you could access the images, I have not tried it, but I doubt it would be the fastest way to access you files.
 
It would work, but as Lightroom maintains a local database you would get into a situation where the file mapped to both lightrooms is out of sync with one of the Lightroom catalogues.
 
Craikeybaby said:
It would work, but as Lightroom maintains a local database you would get into a situation where the file mapped to both lightrooms is out of sync with one of the Lightroom catalogues.
Click to expand...

Maybe move the lightroom catalogue to a dropbox folder to sync between the 2 computers?
 
Rapscallion said:
Maybe move the lightroom catalogue to a dropbox folder to sync between the 2 computers?
Click to expand...

I already use dropbox to sync between the two, so this might work. A copy of Lightroom on each computer reading an up to date and synced catalog off the C drive on both. I suppose that there are two issues here - one is that each catalog would have to be repathed to read each photo on the external HD (am I correct?) and it may well prove to be very slow. My Lightroom is slow at the best of times.

The question arises as I have my photos on my laptop, which is not ideal in any circumstances, but it's HD is now jampacked with raw files. My PC is used for my work, but has a much better quality monitor and is connected to my photo printer. I would love to free up the laptop of photo files with a wireless HD and fine tune photos for printing on the PC, but some niggling doubts about it all working like that remain...and I don't know why. :shrug:
 
Hi Alan, regarding external drive, you may be able to rename the external drive on each machine so that they are both identical mappings. what OS are you using?
 
Rapscallion said:
Hi Alan, regarding external drive, you may be able to rename the external drive on each machine so that they are both identical mappings. what OS are you using?
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It's Vista on both.
 
Hi alan, not sure if it is connecting as a network drive or local drive, but here's 2 link for naming drives. If the drives are mapped identically on both computers, the synched lightroom library should work with the external drive on both computers.

Never tried this so there may be some other things to consider.
 
I have all of my photos on my Desktop PC upstairs, and have just installed LR4 beta on this laptop. When you add files to the catalogue you can chose to leave them in place and not make copies. I have added a few test folders over the network by mapping my images folder as a network drive.
I think if you make changes to an image outside of the local copy of LR you get a little flag on the image saying it has been edited, you can then update the file info from the file or ignore it and use the local info. It is a fair bit slower loading images into develop, but if you only do a little bit of editing on your laptop it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Just tested this out and it looks like you have to save any changes to file, from Metadata ->save to file for another copy of LR to pick them up.
I don't have write access to my photo folder from here so cant say if it will work, but it should do.
 
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Bambi72 said:
Just tested this out and it looks like you have to save any changes to file, from Metadata ->save to file for another copy of LR to pick them up.
Click to expand...

Hi Danny,

I dont think this is necessary if you are using the same catalogue on different machines as the op is doing?
 
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