Suggestions for shared cross-platform photo management?

Question

I have a Mac, my wife has a Win7 machine. Currently I take all of our photos and put them into iPhoto. There's about 35K images in there now. The problem is that they are all accessible only from my Mac and she has to wait for me to put the images on there, etc.

I'm willing to switch away from iPhoto. I know there are some tools that are cross platform (Lightroom, Picasa), but are there any that support a shared library? I can share a volume out via NFS or CIFS that we could both mount, but I want to avoid problems of (potentially) both of us hitting the image database at the same time.

Answer 1

The issue you are going to face is similar to any database-based solution: the issue is ownership over a file and if two systems are trying to change a file at the same time. This can often corrupt a database for systems that are not designed with this concurrency in mind, and most systems are not designed with this in mind. As mentioned above, there are some higher end solutions that are designed with this in mind, but they are expensive and typically designed with an agency in mind.

Assuming you do not wish to purchase an agency solution, Lightroom would do fine, if you did not wish to share the database and each others edits. In this case, you would simply share an external drive with the photos themselves, but each keep your own catalog of edits local to your system. I am not sure if Aperture works this way or not, others can perhaps chime in.

The only alternative to get something close to this function with Lightroom, is for you to share the hard drive of photos as above, but then, use the export/import catalog function of Lightroom to "share' the catalog between machines. So, have your wife export a catalog of images she has edited, and then you import them into your catalog...and so on. Not especially simple, but it will work, as long as you can put up with it.

Of course, if you can get by without sharing edits, then simply put all your images on a network accessible drive, point each copy of Lightroom at this shared drive and edit away. One note: when your wife adds images, they will not automatically be added to your catalog, but you can easily solve this by right clicking on the shared drive link in the Library view, and select 'Synchronize Folder" which will add any new images to your local catalog.

Answer 2

Lightroom is meant more for editing workflow -> download raw images from camera and quickly process and edit. It's not a great viewer.

I would recommend the Picasa from Google. (PC & Mac) You can set it to listen to folder changes, etc. It also reads most common raw formats and has a few editing tools. (some like sharpenning is quite harsh but it is all non destructive)

Personally, I use Lightroom to initially process my images, various plugins to give some my my photos the required "oomph" and for the occasional photo I reach for the full photoshop.

However, once I export my processed photos to jpeg I then go to Picasa. In there i can see all my photos from the last 10 years neatly organized. Uploading to Picasa web albums, Facebook, SmugMug, Flickr, Blogger, etc. is a click of a button operation. E-mailing photos is easy with automatic sizing although I no longer use that very much.

All this being said I don't think things are going to be very snappy over a network, especially not when the files are stored on a NAS as these devices tend to be quite slowin terms of up/down speeds. It will work if you point Picasa to listen to the folder but after a while you might be pulling your hair out especially with large raw files.

Answer 3

If you'd be on Windows only, I'd suggest you to take a look at Daminion, otherwise there two choices in your case: Final Cut Server or Extensis Portfolio

Of course if you are not tight with budget there are an endless number of enterprise level solutions with higher pricing.

Answer 4

I think the answer is to use something web-based. You can either run that on a hosted service somewhere, or on your own machine.

My recommendation is Gallery, which has a nice interface and a decent list of features.

This isn't ideal if you're doing a lot of image editing and want to integrate it into your workflow, but for organization, it works quite well. And as a plus, it works for presentation too.

Answer 5

You can use LR3 on two PCs:

"How many computers are covered by a single license of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3?

Subject to the terms of the software license agreement, the primary user of the computer on which Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is installed may install a second copy of the software for his or her exclusive use on either a portable computer or a computer located at his or her home, provided that the software on the second computer is not used at the same time as the software on the primary computer. Lightroom is sold as multiplatform software, which means it can be installed on either Mac OS X or Windows."

Source: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/faq/

It is great software caching helps little but you may find browsing catalog pretty slow, when you'll use NAS drive it becomes horrible when NAS is connected over WiFi. It is general for any NAS/USB based solution.

I used to have photos and main database on laptop I work most, then I make a copy (using MS Sync Tool) to external HDD so I can use it on my second machine if needed. Also I always keep latest version of db on Dropbox (work as easy backup as well).

If you are going to buy LR, wait for rebate time :)... Adobe sells LR for $199 couple times a year.

Answer 6

You can use Adobe Lightroom, that is the best software for photos management. To enable over network storage you can use a plugin that might be obtained on my site - http://toptechphoto.com/space-light/ It allows to store LR catalog contents on FTP (that can be easily set on NAS).