Lightroom 2 catalogs on Xsan

macucation · JBOD Joined: 01 Sep 2009 Posts: 4

Does anyone have any experience putting a lightroom catolog on an xsan volume? I know that lightroom catalogs can not be put on a network volume. Here is my situation: I have 3 photographers who basically all have roles in the workflow, but all have pretty much the same catalog on each machine. As of now, they are sneaker netting the pictures back and fourth which is not very efficient. I would like to try to put a single library on the xsan where they could all work from. Can this work, my thought is that they would all not be able to work and edit from the same catalog at the same time. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

nrausch · Xsan Master Joined: 14 Sep 2007 Posts: 202

I am by no means a lightroom catalog master.

With that out of the way...

XSAN isn't a network drive. (Unless your clients have access via an ethernet re-share)
So you're in luck there. Each of your 3 clients will see the XSAN as a local drive.

It seems that catalog sharing is still a problem because the database catalog being edited by multiple users will cause corruption. (Hence, no network drives.)

However, you could still greatly benefit from having the assets on XSAN, and using the shared storage to export and import catalogs to each other much faster and with raid protection.

Maybe you could even "merge" the catalogs occasionally so that maybe (Once a week?) all 3 users have an updated "master catalog" and can catch up on what the other users have done, then continue their work from there.

The other option... which would require testing and communication... would be to make sure only one of the 3 opens the library at any time.
This is not favored, and if attempted should be tested with a test Catalog.

It would be nice to see Adobe use MySql or similar to actually allow multiple users to share a database.

macucation · JBOD Joined: 01 Sep 2009 Posts: 4

Yeah, that was my thought as well. I'm a bit bummed because like you said, Adobe should really step this up and make the database more robust to multiple users. I am setting up an Xsan in the next few weeks speifically for Final cut server, but have an extra Apple Xraid that i wanted to incorporate for the photographers.

If this cannot be done, i will more than likely just back up each library to the xsan. Also, i wonder if there would be a way to use chronosync to update each library against a master library, that may be an option. Any thought there?

Thanks for the input!!

nrausch · Xsan Master Joined: 14 Sep 2007 Posts: 202

I don't have a copy of Lightroom 2 on hand, but... when you merge (import one catalog into another"Master Catalog")... doesn't it give you some sort of "conflict detected" message, like when you sync contacts to ipod/ iphone?
Prompting you choose which is the preferred entry? It would be kind of worthless if it just combines every item from all libraries into
Maybe that's too much and too simple to hope for?

you should make 3 tiny test catalogs...

macucation · JBOD Joined: 01 Sep 2009 Posts: 4

I think i am going to try to use chronosync to update catalogs. My understanding is that Lightroom 2 works off of MySQL lite which does not support multiple users. So really, this should be posted on another forum, but i just wanted to check and see if anyone has this situation in their environment.