Lightroom 4

I have upgraded to Lightroom 4 and wished Adobe had made this available in 2 versions:

• Normal - Single Catalog
• Enterprise - Shared Catalog

I am very happy with LR4 and it does perform better than the BETA. The catalog upgrade was seamless and I am finding that re-visiting post-processed photos and switching the updated develop module does seem to bring more detail out of these photos.

Looking forward to testing my plugins and see if they work under LR4 or there is going to be a flurry of software updates from me over the coming weeks.

Lightroom On Multiple Computers?

So I have Lightroom on a couple of computers with a RAID 6 based server and I have been struggling on how to synchronise everything to make my life easier between machines.

I started using robocopy /mir and found this strategy good because it duplicated everything but was a real issue in ensuring changes replicated as I stored both the catalog and the photos on the same disk.

After some decisions I have now moved my photos to the \\server\share and the catalog is tracked via subversion! This makes everything so much easier between machines.

What I have done is created a repository that holds the Lightroom catalog. I have added an exception to not include the preview files as subversion has some issues with them. I also added a couple of batch files that can backup and restore the lightroom preview files to the \\server\share location.

Now my steps are as follows:

1. Update subversion
2. Run update batch file to bring in new preview files
3. Run Lightroom
4. Import pictures
5. Move images between local drive import and shared file share
6. Make any required changes
7. Exit lightroom
8. Commit catalog
9. Run batch file to backup the Lightroom preview files to the \\server\share file
10. That's it!

I have been using this for a week now and I have found this to be robust and reliable without any catalog corruptions.

How do you manage your Lightroom catalog across multiple machines without resorting to carrying around an external hard drive?