Synching keywords,tags on multiple computers

[brainatwork]

Mod Note: Duplicate threads merged, duplicate post deleted.

Hello everyone,

I'm pretty new here so please excuse if a similar question has already been posted (although I've searched the forums)

Here's my problem:

We're an organization (not a studio), but an architectural/sales company. Here's how our work flow goes like:
1. different colleagues, push their pictures to a shared folder located on our file server, which is connected through a gigabit network.
2. those pictures are being sorted by various users and are given proper keywords, tags, ratings, etc
3. then our different departments would like to use those pictures in their daily work flow.

As I type I'm cataloging our huge image collection, and will test if a change made on one computer (new tag) will be visible on the other. If this does not work out of the box, is there a way to make it work ?
Then again, if none of the above is possible with LR2. Do you guys have any other software to recommend ? We've been using ACDSee, but the extreme slowness of it searching for tags over the network has forced me to look for an alternative, LR2 seems a pretty good one.

Ah - We're on a windows environment.

Any kind of support is extremely appreciated. Thank you !

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi brainatwork, welcome to the forum!

Lightroom has limited network support (well, none, really!) so it's not ideal at this point. There are workarounds, but whether all members of staff would get the hang on them could be a pain!

Does everyone need access to all pictures?

 

[Denis Pagé]

Welcome to the forums brainatwork!

I wrote a couple solutions to network Lightroom. One being probably too dangerous for your work environment and more tailored for experiment and another very safe.

But you make me think about a possible third (safe) solution...

• Do you have one Lightroom licence or there is one for each colleagues' machine?
• Do you have a knowledgeable LAN Administrator or are on you own?
• When you say that users are tagging, rating and keywording; Do they do it with Lightroom or something else?
• When they do it, is it from their workstation or from a unique workstation?
• When they put them in the shared folder, do they create subfolders or every photo is in a single top level folder? If the former, is there any folder naming convention?
• Can the different departments work on a dedicated Lightroom workstation or do they have a strict need to work from any machine?
• How many photos are we talking about per shoot/folder?

The more you answer/tell, the more I can get a bright new idea or... come to a sad conclusion.

 

[brainatwork]

Hello guys,
thank you very much for the support.

To clear things out:
@Victoria - yes everyone needs to access pretty much all of the pictures.

@Denis:
1. The licenses are not a problem, whatever we need - we'll buy. At the moment I've installed the trials on each computer.
2. I'm the IT manager for the firm, therefore LAN management is not a problem (I'm on my own to answer your question)
3. They used to use ACDSee, but if we'd move to Lightroom everyone would be using LR + PS (PS being used by certain users, not all) Basically everyone will be using LR
4. They create sub folders yeah, there is no standard defined what they do most commonly is create a folder with the location name+date eg. NYC_31_12_2''9
5. All together there are
- files - 68,812
- folders - 2,713
it hasn't been defined how many pictures should be in a folder, so that variates.
The folder organization is a bit messy (I'm a fresh employee) before I got here, there was little to no administration, so I basically have to inherit all the mess and sort it out.

However, LR seems to be doing quite ok so far. I figured if one selects within the cataloging options, to save changes automatically (tags, keywords) the other workstation has to sync the folders, and he's got the updated data. This "could" actually work for the time being - although an automatic synchronization option would be better, but still aiming for the best solution which is to update the clients live.

Thank you again for taking the time for this.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

However, LR seems to be doing quite ok so far. I figured if one selects within the cataloging options, to save changes automatically (tags, keywords) the other workstation has to sync the folders, and he's got the updated data. This "could" actually work for the time being - although an automatic synchronization option would be better, but still aiming for the best solution which is to update the clients live.

That's exactly the workaround I'd suggest too. FWIW, if you turn on the 'Unsaved Metadata' badge under View menu > View Options, that'll act as a reminder that data needs to be read.