How to organize photos over a network.

[rich_davis3]

<p>I have 5 computers that are networked and use each of them. What I need is a way to organize everything across all drives and machines.</p>

<p>There must be something which works without resorting to a kludge.</p>

[lornesunley]

<p>Usually you use some aspect of your operating systems disk sharing network capabilities. That, of course depends on what operating system your computers are running. Which is????</p>

<p>I used to use the "Toronto Virtual File System" that allows you to set mount points for all the drives on networked computers into a single directory tree. Each computer would see the same view of all the disks on the network.</p>

[patricklavoie]

<p>you get a NAS drive, or a router that give you the opportunity to plug a HD to it.. and its on your Network.. tadam ; )<br>

system and number of computer is irrelevant, some might even give you the opportunity to acces your file from anywhere in the world.</p>

 

[rich_davis3]

<p>Four are Win 7 and 1 is Vista. I have a Windows Home Server on a sixth machine.</p>

<p>To be more specific, it would be wonderful if I could open a Lightroom type program and see everything. If that's possible (I'm not a whiz with LR) I'm not sure how to do it.</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>If you've rigged up a gig-e network (fast enough, in other words, to make all of this tolerable), you need to treat some resource on the network as a server. Are we talking 10GB of images? 10TB? <br /><br />You might also consider running a RDP session from the workstations, running your actual image cataloging/editing app on a single machine.</p>

[lornesunley]

<p>With Windows, your only option(s) are</p>

<p>1) share the folders on each machine that have images etc you want to access<br /> mount each shared folder all all machines using the same drive letter<br /> machine 1 - share image folder as \\machine-name1\images<br /> machine 2 - share image folder as \\machine-name2\images</p>

<p>on machine 1<br /> allocate driver letter M to \\machine-name1\images<br /> allocate driver letter N to \\machine-name2\images</p>

<p>on machine 2<br /> allocate driver letter M to \\machine-name1\images<br /> allocate driver letter N to \\machine-name2\images</p>

<p>continue with the equivalent with all machines</p>

<p>Each machine will see the set of drive letters and their contents</p>

<p>OR</p>

<p>2) get a NAS type file server and put all your images on it, better still buy 2 and set up an automatic copy for NAS 1 to NAS 2 to have a backup.</p>

 

[cudacar2000]

<p>I have all my pictures on a network share (on one machine, but the basic setup is no different than yours). Lightroom works just fine that way - because it is a database too it runs locally except when you actually edit anything, so performance is not a problem. Even if the machine holding the pictures is offline, you can still do anything that does not directly involve edits - you just get a message overlaid on the image that the picture is offline.<br>

Just map a drive from the Lightroom system to all other systems that house the pictures, and import from wherever they are.</p>

[will_daniel1]

Rich, Cerious Software (www.cerious.com) makes a network version of ThumbsPlus software. It's good visual file management system with a reasonably powerful editor built in. With the digicam plug-in you can view your Canon or Nikon raw files using the appropriate color libraries. You can download a trial version. I believe it will be exactly what you're looking for; I've used it to manage editorial images on nine computers.

[sasvata__shash__chatterjee]

<p>Rich, even though technically you could export/share drives from each PC, and mount them on the other PCs, it is generally a nightmare to keep track of where you are placing your original files. As others have mentioned, you could use a NAS server (and I would suggest RAID-1 on the NAS for reliability) which can be mounted by all the PCs, or you could designate one of your existing PCs to hold the largest drives and share that across all PCs.</p>

<p>Mind you, LightRoom doesn't allow putting your catalog on a shared drive, although the images themselves can be on a shared drive. This is because LR does not have the features to manage simultaneous access to the catalog from multiple PCs, so it takes the easy route and prevents you from doing it. What Lorne suggests above is a way around LRs built-in protection, and will allow you to put the catalog on shared drives. But, you have to be careful not to access the catalog simultaneously from two PCs, or else the catalog will get corrupted.</p>

<p> </p>

[mariosforsos]

<p>Spreading your files across 5 or six machines means that you must constantly have all of them powered up just so you can have an efficient operation, even if that is only searching for an image, not editing it.</p>

<p>Your best solution is to "retire" one machine, set it as a server, keep it always on, stock it full of fast drives, put ALL your images onto that one and have the various LR installations on the separate machines access that one machine.</p>

<p>All other solutions seem, to me, like a recipe for disaster.</p>

[will_daniel1]

Marios is correct. When I used the network version of ThumbsPlus, all images were on one server. Anyone on the network who needed to work with an image did so on the server rather than his or her own machine. Any other way of doing it invites chaos and disaster.