I work between my desktop and laptop a lot so I thought the best thing to do is work off of a portable hard drive for the projects that's in progress. My questions is, how do you keep the files on the portable w/o importing the files into the LR folder on the computer's hard drive and still do the editing?

Hope I'm making sense... thanks for any replies.

If you too go back and forth between desktop and laptop I'd love to hear your workflow, mine seems all over the place right now.

This is not possible...and it sucks! Its one of THE main things that I request....networked libraries!

I know..I want to edit on my laptop....where I left off on my desktop...but its not possible....at least now anyways.

Sorry!

Yes, it is possible! I'm doing it right now.... Just create a LR catalog on your external drive. I have several catalogs, one for each type of job I do. I have LR set to ask me which catalog to open every time I start the program. Since both the catalog and the files are on the same drive it opens smoothly on both machines.

One word of warning: you need a fast external HD for this to work well, I have a WD Mybook pro 1TB drive. It's a striped RAID with 2 500GB drives inside and a FW800 connection (its triple interface so it hooks up with any computer via FW or USB).

lol....hmmm...you must be confused.

Or I could very well be wrong, as always. However, I would love to hear you explain how you do this, as I would defiitely learn something here!

Lightroom does not have networked libraries. Its not possible to start editing a batch of photos, stop on photo number 56, then pick up where you left off on your laptop on photo 57...without re-importing again and starting over. I had a long discussion with those guys when I was beta testing 1.2.

Haven't tried this... but swan covers it on his new school blog.

Copy the lightroom LIBRARY file from computer A to computer B

If the computers are networked when you want to work on the files, then the folder list of jobs in Gallery window will show the missing jobs as RED names.

Just right click on the job, and re-direct it over the network to find the files.

If I'm confused, and you want to work on the LR on computer B, while leaving the files behind on Computer A, and head off to Starbucks, thus breaking the network, then you'll have to make sure to copy both the LR Library file and the source images to the laptop before you leave.

Hope this helps????

Hey cool! I knew there was some type of workaround, and that doesnt sound too bad. When it redirects, it keeps the changes made to the ones you've already edited without starting over? And this is because you've already copied the whole library right?

So..basically...you have to constantly sync both networked libraries for this to work?

I haven't played with copying the library file yet, but I do all of my edits with the image files on my laptop's hard drive (and a manual back up on a portable hard drive 750 gb WD firewire). Then, once I'm done editing and exporting, I delete the master RAW files from my laptop.

Then, if I later need to access the raw, and re-tweak an image, I just right click on the job name in Gallery view, and redirect it.

Here's the link to the New School post.

I'm sure it works, I use it every day and I don't consider it a work around, this is the BEST new feature they've added to LR since it's birth (I'm using LR 1.2, haven't changed to 1.3 yet). Check out the attached screen captures. If I double click the LRCAT file it opens it in lightroom (on either machine). When I open LR normally it asks me what catalog to open. Works. perfectly. ;-)

Hey Bill,

What exactly is the difference between the catalog, and the library?

If you are working on RAW files, (not jpegs as Rowena and I talked earlier in a PM) you can save the xmp file on the drive. This won't save the history, but it will show the changes on the file, similar to Bridge and Photoshop. To save the xmp file, go to the library grid view, select all, and Control+S. This will write the xmp file, and put it in the same folder where the RAW files are stored. If you open the RAW file on a different computer, lightroom will read the xmp file and show the changes to the file.

They renamed them. Libraries are now Catalogs.

If you use a separate Catalog for every project and (ideally) store it with the project files, then you can open it from anywhere.

This turned into a really great thread. So it seems we have 2 ways to work on the same batch of photos from 2 different computers.

1. Opening specific catalogs
2. Saving XMP info.

The latter seems faster, but Bill's method does seem very organized. Excellent stuff guys!

I think I'll start the organized catalog thing the first of the year! Sweet!

I do both (Catalogs and XMP sidecar files). One thing that's worth mentioning is that some settings in LR are catalog specific, meaning if you make a new catalog then you'll have to double check some settings. XMP sidecar files are one of those, they are off by default and need to be turned on in the catalog settings window.

The reason I want the XMPs is for my DVD backups, if I ever needed them I want the LR settings to come back with the files on re-import.

Glad to be helpful Nick (and all), I love having seperate catalogs both for the multimachine support and because I can keep fewer jobs in one catalog to keep things speedy (put 20k images in a LR catalog and see what happens to performance).

John's idea of making a catalog for each job is interesting, I hadn't thought of that. If I shot JPG instead of RAW I might just do that to keep all the edits together with the original jpgs. As it is I just export an edited set of JPGs from each job and archive those.

Options are good. :-)

I think that Adobe has realized that their software (and most of their users) are not ready to have one centralized library for everything. To do that right takes a great deal of sophisticated software technology that has to be extremely fault tolerant - and ends up with a lot of overhead.

Yup, Bill's solution is one way to take care of the problem.

Another way is to use the new Lightroom 1.2 feature (or was it 1.1?). In the Library module, File/Export as Catalog and the subsequent Import from Catalog. This is how to export a snapshot of the Lightroom Database for the selected photos or folder and transport that catalog to the next computer. You can choose to export the negatives (photos) to or just leave that option unticked to just export the history of the photo. I usually pick the second option. It's goes much faster that way as long as the photos already resides on your other computer. Working this way allow me to transport my work between the office workstation and the home computer by using just a thumbdrive and thus keeps the databases sync. I am certain that as Lightroom matures, an even better solution will get created but I was happy with that inclusion in the 1.2 update.


-David