Multiuser Lightroom talk

[Denis Pagé]

This thread is opened for discussion about the following Tips & Tricks thread:
Multiuser Lightroom - How to (WinXP, multiple machines with catalog on server/workstation)

Tell us here what are your experiences with it, your discoveries if any and so on...

Hope you enjoyed,

[Depechie]

Hey Denis,

I still have to try this, but thanks in advance for the nice detailed tutorial !!

[steckler]

Would you please list what hardware you use for your SAN / NAS?

thanks.

[Denis Pagé]

Would you please list what hardware you use for your SAN / NAS?

thanks.

Dell PowerVault MD1'''
WD4'''YR-RE2 drives.
Also very important: UPS for everything! Even for Lightroom workstation.

[Zeflash]

Like you said in the original thread, it's a bad idea.
I tried that a very long time ago, as me and my wife wanted to be able to access the same DB from both our computers - as we could with adobe photoalbums

Anyway, I ended up corrupting the catalog pretty much all the time, barely being able to repair it.

Therefore, I took another approach; I do a file sync using a command line tool called unison.
First step is to sync from the server to the local disk, then open the catalog, and when lightroom is closed (or crashed) do a sync the other way around, back to the server.
The most expensive part is to sync all the preview files. There are (at most) one preview file for each picture in the catalog, leading to an ENORMOUS amount of files to scan. But it's still way faster to do than do a brute force copy back & forth, as it scans the timestamps instead of comparing the content of the files.

On my computer, this adds up around 4' seconds of sync before opening the catalog and 4' seconds after closing - for a 1'''' pictures catalog. When things have changed it's of course a bit longer, but still reasonable.

And the catalog is never corrupted, which is oh so much better

here's my batch file:

"Unison-2.27.57 text.exe" -fastcheck true -auto -batch -times -root "c:\lightroom" -root "z:\LightRoom\digipics" -force "z:\LightRoom\digipics"
c:\lightroom\digipics.lrcat
"Unison-2.27.57 text.exe" -fastcheck true -auto -batch -times -root "c:\lightroom" -root "z:\LightRoom\digipics" -force "c:\lightroom"

Z being a shared network drive.

Hope this helps some people.

[Denis Pagé]

here's my batch file:
Hope this helps some people.

Thanks for sharing.

[rnoguera]

Hi,

I have been reading a little about SQLite, and I am wondering that using Terminal Services would work.

When you use Terminal Services (in windows servers), all the processes (Lightroom's .exe) of the different users, are running in the same computer (the server). Locally.


In this scenario SQLite should work correctly, since SQLite aparently does not have any problem with many local applications accessing the database at the same time.

I'll give it a try, and post again.

[Denis Pagé]

Welcome to the forums moguera.
You will be able to access it through a Terminal Server session but as a distant monitor can not be guessed by the server, you will do without color management! And obviously, backup before experimenting...