Does Lightroom work properly across a network?
I have all my photos on a central machine so that I can access them from any other machine around the house. Picasa only works naturally on a local machine so any albums or other grouping I do on one machine is not reflected on any other machine.
Lightroom itself is not specifically designed be run over a network. Lightroom operates as an image catalogue that manages collections of images.
The problem therefore is not so much the location of the images. You can store the underlying images wherever you like ... SAN, NAS, local disk etc. That is not a problem. Lightroom doesn't care if the images are online, nearline or offline. Lightroom just stores a reference to the path.
The problem is the Lightroom catalogue. Its actually an SQLite database. The trouble with using databases over a network is that you can run into all sorts of weird and wonderful problems if you're not doing it right. Its one thing using a client/server database over the network (e.g. mysql, postgres etc.) . Its another thing using something like SQLite where you're manipulating the core database files themselves over the network.
Thus, my recommendation would be :
- Store your images on the network.
- Keep your Lightroom catalogue on your local computer.
- Configure the lightroom catalogue backup functions on your primary machine to backup the catalogue to the network storage.
- Pull/push catalogue from secondary machines as necessary
Or something along those lines. Basically keep the catalogue on the local machines. Use the network as centralised storage and as a means to replicate the catalogue, but don't manipulate the catalogue directly on the network.