After the recent acquisition of a macbook pro, my current setup is as follows:
- The main machine is a desktop PC running windows 7, with a couple of big drives containing both the lightroom catalog and the actual photo files on a separate partition.
- The mobile machine is a mac laptop, using a local copy of the lightroom catalog and accessing the files on the windows machines via a smb share since they are both on the same local network. Of course, as soon as the laptop is unplugged, all the photo files become inaccessible.
I would like to be able to use lightroom on both machines independently and have them synchronize with each other at regular intervals. This is fairly straightforward to do with chronosync, but the main issue is that both LR catalogs do not refer to the photo files in the same way: for the windows machine, it's simply a local folder, whereas the mac has to access it via another path referring to the mounted smb shared folder. It would be a pain to have to fix the broken link every single time I launch lightroom on a different machine than the previous time!
The obvious solution would of course be to put the files on a NAS so that both machines see them in the same way, but limited finances at the moment make this a difficult option. Has anybody else encountered a similar problem in the past? Is there an easier/cheaper solution than the NAS?
Thanks!