Using Lightroom in Mixed PC/Mac Environment

bikelanta

Hello All,

Does anyone have experience working in mixed environments with their photos? For example, I currently have a Mac Mini at home and an HP laptop that can travel with me. That being said, I'm looking into potentially building a desktop PC rig, but also buying a Mac notebook. I don't really need any discussion of why OS X or Windows is a better platform. I'm very well versed in the upsides and downsides of both.

What I would like to know is if anyone operates this type of mixed environment. Are you able to sync your catalog between the two? For example, by using an external drive to host the catalogs and images, are you easily able to plug and play between the two platforms? Anything specific regarding file systems or other incompatibilities? Any best practices or reasons it doesn't work very well?

Thank you very much in advance for your thoughts and knowledge.

T.J.

tijoseph

I use both but don't sync like you suggested. When traveling, I use my macbook pro, but then basically by way of external hard drive, move all my finished images to my PC desktop. It is there that i really do most of my work. I just use my laptop as a temporary spot to edit and hold photos.

Richard

bikelanta wrote:

Anything specific regarding file systems or other incompatibilities? Any best practices or reasons it doesn't work very well?

T.J.

Last I heard, LR doesn't like network drives, but I think if you use an external drive mounted on one machine at a time, it should be OK. One gotcha is that out of the box, OS-X cannot write to an NTFS file system, so you either need to format the drive as FAT32 or look for third party products that overcome this limitation.

pathfinder

I use two external FireWire drives to hold my image files when in the field connected to my MacBook Pro, so that I never store image files on the internal hard drive in my MBP. It would get filled up very quickly in just a few weeks of traveling. I then use on of these drives to transfer the image files to my main storage drives in my desk top computer ( which is a MacPro, but that is really not relevant ) and import them into the Lightroom catalog on my Desk top.

There is an article about synching Catalogs in LR in the current May/June issue of Digital PhotoPro about this subject written by Seth Resnick and Jamie Spritzer.

As long as the external drives are compatible with both OS X and Windows files systems - FAT32 say - then this should not be an issue. You can copy your Catalog from your lappie to your external drive to get it to your desktop for synching there.

They suggest using at least one external drive ( two is better and what I do ) that have been recently formatted so that they are empty, and using that with the laptop to store image files imported from your Compact Flash card, and your Lightroom Catalog. You can edit the images, and the metadata in the field. Verify that in LRs settings, you have checked Automatically write changes to XMP file.

You can find the article here

bikelanta

Thanks

pathfinder wrote:

You can find the article here

Great link. Thanks to everyone for their thoughts.