Forcing ReadOnly access

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Over the last year, I have carefully built up my catalog with many thousands of pictures. Now there are other people who need to access the catalog (only for browsing and exporting purposes), but I don't want to run the risk that these people are making any changes to any photo - intentionally or unintentionally.

I've searched forums and websites, find other people asking the same question. But never any kind of solution is offered. I cannot believe I am the only person in the world who wants to protect all his hard work and provide some sort of read-only access to the database - for others or even myself.

How can I do this?

I am considering building a script for 'read-only' users that copies the lrcat first, uses that copy for the LR session, deletes it afterwards and then puts the original lrcat back. Not exactly read-only, but this way any and all changes would be ignored.

Any better ideas?
 
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[quote author=pavink link=topic=9322.msg62747#msg62747 date=1267998442]
Over the last year, I have carefully built up my catalog with many thousands of pictures. Now there are other people who need to access the catalog (only for browsing and exporting purposes), but I don't want to run the risk that these people are making any changes to any photo - intentionally or unintentionally.

[/quote]You might find LRViewer to be the tool you need. It is free BTW and it works off of oyur existing LR catalog for just such an issue that you present.
http://www.basepath.com/ImageIngester/LRViewer-info.php
 
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Actually, I've tried LRViewer (and yes, it is pretty much what I am after), but found it to be unstable and unreliable so gave up on that solution. Thank you for your response.
 
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[quote author=erro link=topic=9322.msg62778#msg62778 date=1268'68369]
I haven't tried this myself... but what if you make the .lrcat-file read-only?
[/quote]The .lrcat file is a SQLite database file and I think LR will try to open it as a full read/write user everytime. You can make it read-only, but I'm thinking that this will generate an error.
 
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No - .lrcat can't be read-only (would have been the obvious and perfect solution....). Tried that. And that is how I arrived at the 'solution' of creating a 'read-only' session by copying the lrcat and then disposing the lrcat afterwards. Although that still leaves holes, like when someone deletes a picture (delete from disk) during the 'read-only' session - that picture/file won't be restored by putting back the original lrcat file...

LightRoom is such a well-designed program, and therefore I think I find it so frustrating that 'simple' read-only access is not part of the vision. Just like many others out there, I spent hundreds of hours getting my catalog just right, and I would like to protect it from any unintentional changes when the catalog is just used for browsing/searching/exporting pictures. Is that not a something other people worry about?
 
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If you give your read only session 'read only' access to the image files as well they will not be able to delete an image from disk. LR will just error. You will need to store your images on a secure file system like NTFS and not FAT32.
 
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