Managing two Lightroom Catalogs using Network Attached Storage

[TylerW]

So I've recently built a NAS on my home workflow with the idea that I would use it as the sole location of my unified Lightroom catalog that I would access on both my desktop workstation (A PC running Windows 7) and my laptop (A Macbook on OSX). I've loaded all of my photos on the thing, then loaded my catalog, tried to open it, to find the surprise that lightroom WILL NOT work with catalog files that are located on a network. The files can reside there, but the catalog has to be mounted locally for performance and data integrity reasons.

Helps to do your research I guess.

Still, not really a miss since I'm still able to keep my files in one single location on a big fat mirrored drive set. But now I'm trying to figure out a good workflow to manage the two different catalogs. I figure the primary library will reside on the desktop, since that's where I do the bulk of my photo work. All the photography files (RAWs, JPGs) will live on the NAS. So I guess what Id like to be able to do is when I've finished editing a photoset ont he Macbook, to be able to export just the XML and metadata (all of my lightroom edits, essentially) and then be able to fold those into the catalog on the desktop.

I realize you can do this to some degree with "Export as Catalog" except that function wants to move the Raw files around. I don't want to do that. I just want a manageable container for the XML data.

Anyone have experience with this kind of workflow?

[TylerW]

Answered my own question. Turns out that ticking the "automatically export settings to XMP" box will preserve my edits in the raw file itself. It doesn't retain the flagged status, so there's still some experimentation to be done to see how to preserve my selection between computers, but this is a pretty pleasing step int he right direction.

Thanks to anyone to spent time fussing over this. :D

[Zerodog]

I do it with my laptop/ desktop. It bugs the hell out of me and I think it is the biggest, if not only downfall to LR. I like to sort photos on my laptop then do heavy editing/ storage to my desktop and store everything on my external drive. The best way I have found is to "import photos from catalog" This works fine for the laptop which has a much smaller catalog. But I have yet to make it work the other way with the huge catalog of the desktop.