Multiple servers used

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mlevin

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Mod Note: Thread moved from Feature Requests to the more appropriate General Discussion forum.

I am new to LR and work at a university. We want to add metadata to many existing images that reside on various servers that are off site. I can't import all those thousands of images into one place. We want to be able to navigate to the server and add metadata from LR. Can this be done?
Mary Levin
 
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Mary, Welcome to the Forums. Simple answer, No.

More complicated answer, maybe, but I don't think you'll be happy with the results.

How many images, servers, users?
 
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Welcome to Lightroom Forums.

Are the images available over the network from your machine that would be running Lightroom? If so, you wouldn't need to move the images.

After adding the metadata would you then also be using LR to manage these images going forward (search for them, etc.), or is this a one-time effort to add metadata? I ask this because it's not clear to me that Lightroom is the right tool for the job, unless you'll then be using Lightroom to search the database later.
 
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multiple servers

Right now we have 4 servers with images. I have always used PS and bridge but we did not take advantage of metadata when entering jobs and scans and I heard LR was so much better for adding metadata. So, for new jobs I understand the procedure I believe but for existing images I am unclear. We are talking thousands of images.
Mary
 
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Okay, Lightroom sounds suitable in this environment, particularly if groups of images get similar metadata. There are a number of tools for choosing which metadata to apply to which images, which could dramatically speed the application of the metadata.

Even if you don't stick with Lightroom later for searching, the metadata are applied in the same way as Bridge and PS, so there's no disconnect there.

The only real disadvantage to Lightroom for this task is that it will feel the need to build previews for all of your images, which takes quite a while and a fair bit of computing power, but once it's done its fast. Those previews are useless for your needs, but it's one-time pain (and you could just leave it going overnight).
 
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multiple servers

Thanks. Am I better off just working with the Bridge Metadata templates? Instead of just navigating to the location on the server and applying the template, LR seems to want to import the image first and does that mean it has to import to the home computer all images that I want to apply meta data to? This seems crazy. Or I just don't know what I am doing here.
thanks,
mary
 
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In this case, "Importing" into Lightroom really just means you're telling Lightroom about the file. It doesn't actually need to copy or move the file, it'll just read some information out of it and store that information in its database.
 
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multiple servers

Well, that is encouraging news. Since you are a LR guru do you think the metadata feature of LR is superior to Bridge? I really appreciate your help and advice a lot.
Mary
 
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Mary, I'm not qualified to comment on the relative merits of Bridge. I swore off Photoshop (and Bridge) almost three years ago when I got started with Lightroom, and even then I was never working with large numbers of files back then, as I was working with scanned film.

Hopefully someone else can answer that question for you.
 
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I'm not sure you'd need to render previews if all you wanted to do was add metadata. When you import photos into the catalog you have the option of rendering or not rendering previews.

I'm not familiar with Bridge, but in LR yeah I think you'd just have to "import" (import meaning make LR aware of the files) all the pictures and then you could add metadata to them in the library view. I don't know if this is faster or slower than Bridge, but it might be less tedious as you coudl set LR to import everything and then walk away for a few (or a lot of) hours and then come back later and start applying metadata.

Norman
 
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