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Best Workflow for Multiple Editors & Shared Storage

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HelloWIll

New Member
Joined
May 14, 2018
Messages
5
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
8.0 Classic
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
We are a growing company that has CatDV media asset manager that is handling our photos and video ingestion and we use a Lightroom Classic / Photoshop photo workflow. We are trying to determine the best way to work with photos as we grow and scale to empower photo editors.

BACKGROUND
  • CatDV handles our ingest process, and moves the media to the appropriate folder
  • All raw media is stored on a NAS
  • Our editors use Mac and PC
  • We have 10 Gbps network in the office
  • We have local and remote photo editors
  • We are currently using Lightroom and Photoshop for our photography and timelapse workflows


I understand there are limitations with regards to running Lightroom on a network share, so what's the best way to facilitate multiple photo editors being able to work in a non-destructive way?

How can I make sure photo editors' changes and modifications are accessible to give feedback and input?
What workflows have you seen that incorporate multiple photo editors?
What does the remote workflow look like?
Do you separate your timelapse and photography into different catalogs?
How can we take all our old lrcat's from all our old editors and combine them into one catalog and clean them?
How can we keep things going clean going forward?
 
I understand there are limitations with regards to running Lightroom on a network share
It’s worse than ‘limitations’. You can’t run Lightroom on a network share.
 
Correct. Lightroom is based on SQLite architecture, which is incapable of gracefully handling multiple users and is not great at dealing with latency.

So, with that limitation in mind, what are some alternative ways to leverage Lightroom in a shared environment? My idea is to have each user have their own Lightroom catalog on their workstations, and export the final edits to another ingest folder that can be re-ingested, but I am not sure if there's a better way.
 
How can we take all our old lrcat's from all our old editors and combine them into one catalog and clean them?

You can use the "import from another catalogue" command and then optimize the master catalogue.

Is everyone working at the same location?
 
No, most are at the same location but not all. We have 1 worker right now that is remote, and 2 other satellite offices with a VPN connection back to our HQ but we will probably end up with several remote workers.
 
Not want you want to hear but if everyone is under the same roof they could share an external drive. Kinda primitive for your needs. Not sure if Classic cloud synced smart previews would do it.
 
If multiple people wanted to edit the same raw files, but wanted to do it with their own touch, what's the best way to facilitate that? If I have the original RAW files set as read-only, how could I have all the lightroom users store their sidecar metadata files in some other shared folder (not next to the original media but still accessible)?
 
If multiple people wanted to edit the same raw files, but wanted to do it with their own touch, what's the best way to facilitate that? If I have the original RAW files set as read-only, how could I have all the lightroom users store their sidecar metadata files in some other shared folder (not next to the original media but still accessible)?
Raw files are read-only by definition, but if you want to have multiple sidecar files, then the only option would be to create (real, not virtual) copies, one for each worker. Quite frankly I think that Lightroom is simply not the right tool for this.
 
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