images/catalogs on a NAS, accessing from 2 or more PCs

[hjulenissen]

Disclaimer:
This may not work, and may cause all kinds of problems. Use at your own risk.

I have all of my image files located on a NAS. I access this NAS using a variety of computers, but most importantly, my "office PC" (where I do all of my editing) and my living-room PC (where I occasionally like to browse my LR catalog, but never edit anything).

Here is the problem: Lightroom will happily read image files from a NAS, but refuse to open a catalog from my NAS ("Lightroom Catalogs can not be opened on network volumes, removable storage, or read only volumes". I have a proposed solution:

Computer A (the editing computer) has a local .lrcat that it reads and write to. It is setup to backup that catalog every week to my NAS.

Computer B (the living room computer) will on every lightroom startup copy the latest lrcat backup found on the NAS into a local folder, and work against it.

Practically, computer B use a batch file that does the magic (inspired by http://stackoverflow.com/questions/97371/how-do-i-write-a-windows-batch-script-to-copy-the-newest-file-from-a-directory)

:Variables
SET LRCatSourcePath="\\MYNAS\Images\Lightroom\"
SET LRCatDestPath="F:\Images\Lightroom\"
SET LRExePath="C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.4\lightroom.exe"

FOR /F "delims=|" %%I IN ('DIR /S "%LRCatSourcePath%\*.lrcat" /B /O:D') DO SET NewestFile=%%I
copy "%NewestFile%" %LRCatDestPath%
%LRExePath%

I call this file with a desktop shortcut that lends the Lightroom icon and with the Run property set to "Minimized" to avoid the command-line pop-up. Thus with a single click I can launch Lightroom with a catalog that is (at most) 1 week old.

-h

[aduke]

If Computer A were to backup LR every time you exit LR, Computer B would have access to the current catalog, except if you were still editing on Computer A.

You must, of course, never edit on Computer B. I would expect this to work as long as both computers were not editing simultaneously.

Alan

[hjulenissen]

If Computer A were to backup LR every time you exit LR, Computer B would have access to the current catalog, except if you were still editing on Computer A.

You must, of course, never edit on Computer B. I would expect this to work as long as both computers were not editing simultaneously.

Alan

If both computers were editing (and uploading) simultaneously, it would be a throw of dice who gets to overwrite the others result. As I have setup computer B to not do backups (against my NAS) I have effectively removed it from the loop: any local changes to its lrcat will be overwritten on application restart.

If I was truly running multiple edit stations against a shared file, I would probably run some code revision system (svn?) if the lrcat file is sufficiently "text-like". Thankfully, that is not what I need, I only want to be able to browse my images in front of the tv at times with all of the search-support of Lightroom.

-h 

[aduke]

Right. The danger level goes up as the number of simultaneous accesses goes up and the communication between the operators goes down.

Alan