- Home
- Sci & Tech
- How to share your Lightroom with other computers!
How to share your Lightroom with other computers!
- By Tom McGuire
- Published 01/7/2007
- Sci & Tech , Art & Design
- 14108 views
-
:
Tom McGuire
 |
The founder of http://Pinwire.com and loves nothing more than endlessly adding articles. |
Tom McGuire
I have a few people that work on our photo library and it became very clear very quickly that with RawShooter getting farther away from reach that some workflow work-arounds would need to be addressed yesterday.
So, I took things into my own hands and came up with a little short-time fix until Adobe can sort out how they want to handle the features related to network access. Oh how I miss RawShooter and the way it stored the image changes in a tidy little sub-folder.
This is a batch file that will automate the copying and shuffling around of your Lightroom related data. It has a nice little menu and some basic backup features.
Read through it and make changes as you see fit. I may be making some little tweaks as I start to use it more in a production environment. In any case there is a time-stamp in the header of the batch file so you know you know what the latest version is.
To use this batch file simply goto the bottom of this article and download the file. It is a ZIP file so you will need to unzip it before you can use it. Also, please open the batch file with Notepad and give it a quick read so you can make any changes.
|
@echo off TITLE Adobe Lightroom - File Copier :: Tom McGuire - www.pinwire.com :MENU :EXIT :PUT :LOCBACKUP :GET :NETBACKUP :TOMSITE :HELP |
It is assumed that you already have a folder on a network accessible server and that you already have access to and that it is shared up for access over your local area network.
It is (sadly) assumed that you are using Windows XP for this tutorial.
Browse to your network server and right click on the share that has your photos in it. Then select map network drive.
In the ‘Map Network Drive’ window choose drive P: (Photos) and make sure to check the box ‘Reconnect at Login’. Click Finish. Your new Drive P: should be listed in your Drive list in ‘My Computer.’
Verify your drive P: is available by double clicking your ‘My Computer’ icon on your desktop or by Pressing the Windows Key + E at the same time. Drive P: should be listed there, probably near the bottom. (NOTE: If you chose a drive letter other than P: you will need to edit the batch file to reflect the different drive letter.)
If you already have Lightroom installed then you don’t need to do this next step.
Install Adobe Lightroom and add some photos to a shoot. The goal here is to get the basic data folder structure generated. It is assumed that you know how to add photos and shoots to Lightroom. If you do not then read up real quick how to do it and then come back to this document.
Now close Lightroom and copy the Lightroom folder from here:
Replace ‘user’ with your own username.
C:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom
Copy it to: P:\Lightroom
Browse back to:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom and rename the Lightroom folder to Lightroom-Backup
Now launch the Batch file and select 3 (Download Network Lightroom folder to Local). This will copy the files from P:\Lightroom to C:\Lightroom. It should turn green and start showing a scrolling list of the files being copied.
Launch Lightroom and you will hopefully see a message box titled ‘Confirm.’
Click the ‘Locate Library’ button then ‘Choose’ and browse to the C:\Lightroom folder and select Lightroom Library.aglib and click ‘Open’ then ‘Select.’
Lightroom will open with your data just as it was before.
You need to copy the batch file to each computer you want to share your Lightroom data with.
Conclusion:
We basically moved the Lightroom data to a network server and forced Lightroom to use our new duplicated data at C:\Lightroom. All of this could be avoided if Adobe would implement network access of data and locking of file settings on images that are currently being edited.
Therefore this system is still not a complete solution for working on the image at the same time on multiple computers because changes will only be as recent as the last upload or download from the mapped network drive.
Download Lightroom from here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/
Enjoy.
Spread The Word
Attachments
6 Responses to "How to share your Lightroom with other computers!"
|
said this on 08 Jan 2007 9:16:41 AM
Great idea; let me know if you hear of someone who's done the same thing in the Mac environment. Thanks for all the effort. Maybe V1 will include network-friendliness.
(
 ) |
|
said this on 19 Nov 2007 2:40:44 PM
Still even with the release of Lightroom 1.3 there is NO way to store you data files or access photos from the network? Can it be true?
(
) |
|
said this on 27 Nov 2007 4:39:37 PM
Thanks for this.
One suggestion for any future release would be that a log file be created (probably saved on p:drive), so the next time the batch file were run, it would check/state which direct the database was last moved. For example, if "johnny" selected to transfer the database from p:drive to his machine, the next time the batch file were run, it would say "database was copied from the server to johnny's machine. Johnny will have the most up-to-date version. Please ensure that the database has been transferred back to the server from Johnny's machine before proceeding with any other action/selection. Not doing this will potentially unsyncronise the database, leaving you with two modified copies." Once again, thanks for this. Thomas Greve (
) |
|
said this on 30 Nov 2007 5:24:02 PM
UPDATE:
This script has the potential to work well if the Lightroom folder is small (500mb or so). We tried using the script with a folder that was 3.8Gb and it simply took hours to squeeze the data through our network. We have reverted to using a Pen/Flash Drive instead. We've set up the drive to be P: and are using Microsoft's SyncToy to do the synconising for us. Regards, Thomas Greve (
) |
|
said this on 30 Nov 2007 9:59:56 PM
I have had good success with large transfers over the lan. But we have gigabit and are still using XP which has way way faster network transfers than Vista. I've been playing around with some other tools and am currently coming up with a less network intensive solution. I'll keep you posted.
(
) |
|
said this on 12 Jul 2008 4:13:25 AM
Not sure where you get the idea that XP is faster than Vista in network transfers. Vista is way more efficient than XP in this regard.
(
) |
