A Wild Vista

If you’ve taken a look at the About page for this blog, you’ll see that I recently purchased a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I say recently — I’ve actually been using the software for a good three months now. Still, I’ve a huge amount to learn and, as of last week, I think I’ve come across my first major stumbling block.

Thus far, issues have been relatively minor, and resolvable without too much drama. Adobe’s support centre combines decent product documentation with community sourced tips and comments, so it’s almost always been easy to find an answer to my questions without having to kick off an extended internet trawl.

The stumbling block is actually a consequence of a couple of other recent purchases — a Samsung N110 Netbook, and a wireless router/ADSL modem. Now that I’m a two-computer household (despite having taken to the wireless netbook to the extent that I’ve pretty much abandoned the clunky desktop PC), there’s the new joy of synchronising work, and sharing resources between the two machines.

Having installed Lightroom on the netbook, I thought it would be straightforward to attach a removable hard drive (containing my image archive and Lightroom catalog) to the wireless router, and fire up Lightroom. With the removable drive listed as a network drive in Explorer on the netbook, I did just this. Problem is, when I pointed Lightroom at the network-drive catalog, I was presented with:

Lightroom won't play with remote catalogs

Bugger.

Thing is, this shouldn’t really have come as a great surprise. While researching Lightroom prior to buying it (this is by far the most I’ve ever spent personally on a piece of software), I recall coming across a few blog and forum posts that bemoaned Lightroom’s shortcomings when it comes to networking. As it happened, these comments were generally written from the perspective of professional photographers with multi-user requirements that I simply don’t have. So I ignored them.

The irritating thing is, I don’t want to access the same catalog from two machines simultaneously. Ever. There’s only one of me, and I’m not going to start Lightroom on both machines. What I would find useful, is the ability to work from either my netbook, or my desktop, and not have to mess about keeping two copies of the catalog in sync.

I found a brief note of explanation as to why Lightroom may behave in this way. Apparently, the catalog uses the open source SQLite database, which doesn’t have multi-user capabilities, hence the lockdown on shared drive access. It would, I have to say, be a lot more convenient if access via a network drive was allowed, and only subsequently prevented if the catalog/database file was already in use and locked.

Ho hum. The answer for now has simply been to take a copy of the catalog for use on my netbook (at only 70MB, this is no great chore). This works fine, but begs further questions:

• How should I go about synchronising/combining the catalog files on the two machines? I’m particularly concerned that I don’t lose metadata or change history for individual images.
• What’s the best way to handle pre-built preview images? These are stored outside the main catalog file, and should probably be copied too to save having to rebuild them all?

I think before I get stuck in to the Adobe Lightroom support centre, I really need to clarify exactly how I want to work — at least then I’ll be able to ask the right questions!