Wireless Hard Drive for LR?

[dovbaer]

Lightroom Version Number

LR Classic 9.3

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

I work on a laptop, so, without plugging in to an external hard drive, I only have access to photos that are currently on my laptop. Do they now have external hard drives where my laptop always knows where the photos are? That way, I can sit in my favorite chair and work on any of the 100,000+ photos that I want.

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

A NAS server (of which there are many) can server up disks via wifi from file shares, so if the NAS is on your Wifi you can do that. It's not exactly an external drive, as a external storage system (i.e. they are usually quite a bit larger and more expensive than a single EHD). I suppose someone might have done an EHD with wifi, it would take only about $10 in hardware to add it to an EHD, but for what you describe you might want something a bit more ... substantial.

 

[Jim Wilde]

I work on a laptop, so, without plugging in to an external hard drive, I only have access to photos that are currently on my laptop. Do they now have external hard drives where my laptop always knows where the photos are? That way, I can sit in my favorite chair and work on any of the 100,000+ photos that I want.

The alternative approach would be to use Smart Previews....they would be stored on the laptop alongside the regular library previews, but they allow editing to be done when the original is offline,

Another alternative would be to sync your images from Classic to the cloud (at no cost, Classic only syncs smart previews to the cloud and they don't count against your cloud storage allowance). Once synced, you can access them on your laptop either by using the LrWeb app in the laptop's browser, or you could install and use the Lightroom desktop app (which would access the smart previews in the cloud). Most things that you can do in the Lightroom apps will sync back to Classic, just avoid keywords and location data changes as these don't sync. You could even work without the laptop in your favorite chair, accessing the cloud smart previews on either a tablet or a smartphone.

 

[barman58]

A lot, maybe the majority of reasonable level Wireless routers have a built in USB port, this can be used for a print server or a standard EHD, connected by USB to the Router rather than the laptop itself, I have an 4 TB drive connected to my Netgear Nighthawk router, and setup as a network drive on my systems.

It's a lot cheaper than a dedicated NAS, and connected via USB 3 and Ethernet, (I use mostly desktops ), it's just like and additional internal Hard Disk

It will also work via wireless of course so I can access it from Mobile devices

 

[PhilBurton]

I work on a laptop, so, without plugging in to an external hard drive, I only have access to photos that are currently on my laptop. Do they now have external hard drives where my laptop always knows where the photos are? That way, I can sit in my favorite chair and work on any of the 100,000+ photos that I want.

Wireless external hard drives do exist. But as Ferguson said, you will pay a premium. Look at this store search. All the external drives here cost a lot more than the same drives attached via USB. Newegg – Shopping Upgraded

Phil Burton