# Lightroom Catalog Issues with NAS Devices



## jackjohn777

I'm hoping to get some help with an issue I have, because I'm new to Lightroom, and I seem to have fallen at the first hurdle when it comes to setting up the software to work the way I'd like.

I specifically bought Lightroom 4 because I wanted a great tool for primarily managing and displaying my entire photo database, which is pretty large. However I'm wondering if I've wasted my time given some information I've just found out, unless I want to change the whole way I'm currently working, potentially duplicate effort when it comes to photo workflow, and buy more hardware, because I currently use a NAS device (Synology Diskstation DS212) for all my different types of files.

When I installed the software and tried to move the Lightroom Catalog folder, and the folder for importing my photos, to the NAS device from an internal drive I got the following message upon reopening Lightroom and trying choose a new catalog location: “Lightroom cannot open the catolog named ‘Lightroom 4 Catalog’ located on network volume \\Myserverexample’ Lightroom catalogs can not be opened on network volumes, removable storage or read only volumes.”

When I searched for a possible reason online I noticed a lot of people were having the same problems with their NAS device and I found the following reply to some of their queries from a blog author, so thought I'd come to the source she mentioned:

"Unfortunately this is an easy one to answer — your catalog can’t go on a network drive. I haven’t followed work-arounds, but the moderators over at lightroomqueen.com/community know everything"

Given it seems Lightroom can't be used with NAS devices do I really have to either forget about using Lightroom for the purpose I want, OR create two network/workflow systems depending on the file types in question i.e. one network/set up to cover everything other than photos (music/documents etc) and one for photos which isn't as flexible as the other set up?

For example normally all my pcs and macs (as well as PS3, ipad and iphone) communicate with all my centrally stored files on the NAS, so I dont need to duplicate or store the files on each device using up space, and I can simply access what I want when I want on each device either directly on my local network or via the web. I also back up the NAS regularly to an external HD. 

However, would I now need to either move all my photos off the NAS device and store them on one mac with Lightroom (or duplicate the current photos on the NAS onto the mac, and vice versa whenever new ones are added to the mac in order to keep getting the NAS benefits across devices), which would probably fill up that mac anyway given how many I have in total, OR alternatively buy yet another external HD, but just for photos, which is also backed up to an external hard drive i.e. have one method of working for everything other than photos, and one of those two systems I just mentioned for photos including the extra hardware?

I'm really hoping I've totally misunderstood all this, as it seems insane to not be able to simply use a really sensible modern NAS way of working, and instead run two concurrent workflow/management systems meaning extra hardware, extra effort and less benefits all because Lightroom won't let you have a catalog on a NAS. 

Thanks

PS Sorry if this isn't very clear as it was quite hard to get the message across clearly and succinctly.


----------



## Hal P Anderson

Welcome to the forum!

Yes, you cannot have your _catalogue_ on a network drive, but you can certainly have your images there. 

The catalogue and the previews that LR creates have to be on a locally attached drive, but the images can be wherever you want. The catalogue doesn't contain your pictures, just pointers to them.

I suggest that you take a peak at the Starter Kit to get a better idea of how Lightroom works.

Hal


----------



## jackjohn777

Hal P Anderson said:


> Welcome to the forum!
> 
> Yes, you cannot have your _catalogue_ on a network drive, but you can certainly have your images there.
> 
> The catalogue and the previews that LR creates have to be on a locally attached drive, but the images can be wherever you want. The catalogue doesn't contain your pictures, just pointers to them.
> 
> I suggest that you take a peak at the Starter Kit to get a better idea of how Lightroom works.
> 
> Hal




Thanks for the quick reply Hal.

That's good it's not as bad as I thought and I'll check out the 'Starter Kit' you've linked, however I assume this means that I can't work on my photos from different devices with Lightroom on them, such as work on my macbook laptop as if I'm on my mac desktop and vice versa, because my catalog will only be in one place? 

If it's not in the starter kit is there a specific reason you can't put the catalog in one shared place on a NAS, but you can put it on a standard external hard drive?

Thanks again


----------



## clee01l

JackJohn, Welcome to the forum.  To expand a bit upon what Hal has said.  LR uses a database and a database engine called SQLlite.  This database engine though as capable as Oracle, SQLServer or mySQL is designed for one user at a time. This is the major difference between it and the 'big guns'.  If you place the database file (LR's catalog) on a network drive,  there is no guarantee that another user might have the file open and writing to it at the same time. Should this happen, the results would be a catastrophe.  It is the folks that write the SQLlite software that do this to protect your data from corruption.  Image file can as Hal said go on any local or remote drive.   You can use a local Dropbox folder to make your catalog available to multiple computers if you want to share a single catalog between computers, BUT it is your responsibility to manage the database security to prevent corruption.


----------



## jackjohn777

Thanks very much Cletus. 

You've actually answered a lot of what I followed up with to Hal, but it hadnt published post moderation at the time you replied.

I'll definitely bear the dropbox idea in mind, as I'm the only one using it. 

I must admit I didn't think the concern the SQlite guys have would apply in my scenario because I would have placed the appropriate Lightroom items in a folder/section only accessible to NAS admin i.e. me, which is also password protected, so even if there were more users sharing the NAS, I could guarantee they wouldn't have write access to that area to cause a conflict, or even read access if I didn't want it to happen, and these read/write options are check boxes within every NAS folder. Also what's the difference between say storing the data on an external NAS device and storing it on an external hard drive because I've seen tutorials at lightroom labs explaining how to store both the catalog and photo folder on the latter? 

There is one other concern I have...

I'd like to be able to pick up any device to hand such as my macbook pro or an ipad or even my iphone and show someone photos from my collection. I can obviously do this using the NAS without having the files on those devices, however the photo database on the NAS called 'photo station' is really poor in terms of cataloging photos e.g. you can't tag photos and just choose to display photos that 'Fred' is in, or just those shot in 'London', or just those shot with 'lens 50mm' etc, you have to put photos into albums, and photos can only be in one album e.g. one photo can't be visible a 'London' album and a 'Fred' album or '50mm album'. It's also v poor for searching. These reasons are one big plus for moving to Lightroom BUT it's occurred to me now, that if I store the catalog on e.g. my macbook pro and have the lightroom photos in a single photo station folder on the NAS called e.g. 'Lightroom Photos' then I wont be able to really get the display/cataloging/slideshow/search benefits of Lightroom when I'm for example on my ipad or another laptop and wanting to show some friends a group of photos, because I will still be restricted by the inflexibility of Photo Station. I would only be able to get benefits close to what I want if I put Lightroom onto every single device I own (and presumably I cant for my ipad, iphone, ps3 etc) and would also need to use the dropbox catalog solution you mentioned. Have I understood that correctly i.e. Lightroom is great for displaying if you're on one specific device, but it isn't necessarily that good if you want the flexibility to display images across all your devices whichever is most convenient at that time?

Finally, I assume that in Photo Station on the NAS I will need to now create one master parent folder called e.g. Lightroom Photos, and move all the existing albums that appear when I currently go into Photo Station across into the 'Lightroom Photos' folder, so that is now the only thing displayed when I first open Photo Station? This way Lightroom can be used to cover my whole photo collection rather than just the photos I have uploaded since buying the software. Also if I create further sub-folders/Album names in the future on the NAS within 'Lightroom Photos' (so I can more easily use the NAS display capabilities across all devices) after I've already uploaded my photos, then I'm assuming they would need remapping within Lightroom because initially they'd have gone to 'Lightroom Photos' and then I'd be moving them on the NAS to their new album name and breaking the map? This is complicated to write clearly!   

Thanks


----------



## Brad Snyder

Dan Tull, Lr's database engineer, (or at least he was for several years) categorically stated that using the Lr catalog on a network share was a 'bad idea'. His experiments, using many of the spoofs, and/or single user permissions, etc. frequently resulted in catalog corruption. 

You can certainly get it to 'sort-of' work, but straight from the horse's mouth, you'll be playing with fire. 

Yes, you've understood correctly that the full functionality of Lr depends on it residing on a single device, Mac/PC. You can move stuff back and forth in a desktop/laptop environment, but even there you need to keep you wits about you. 

Many folks use a Lr function termed 'publish collections' to manage multi-device sharing/display capabilities, but even there, the downstream/destination searchability and flexibility will depend on tools available on the destination device. 

I don't know 'Photo Station' so I can't add anything to those thoughts.


----------



## clee01l

Perhaps you have read that LR is a non destructive editor.   That means that any adjustments that you make in LR will not be seen on the original image if you view it outside of LR.  A derivative file (i.e. one containing the original plus any LR adjustments) is necessary to view the edited image outside of LR.  LR come with a Publish Service that will Publish Exported JPEGs to any location that you wish.  Often these are photosites like Flickr but that can be to your Hard Drive (local or NAS). 
Perhaps a better solution might be to utilize the iCloud Photostream or iTunes.  i use both.  I use iTunes to create image folders for my AppleTV.  I publish to a local folder that is monitored by the Photostream process in iPhoto.  (I don't use iPhoto for anything else BTW)


----------



## Samoreen

clee01l said:


> This database engine though as capable as Oracle, SQLServer or mySQL is designed for one user at a time. This is the major difference between it and the 'big guns'.  If you place the database file (LR's catalog) on a network drive,  there is no guarantee that another user might have the file open and writing to it at the same time.



Correct. However Bibble 5 (now Corel Aftershot) is also using SQLite and is allowing to share a catalog on a network. If SQLite can't manage simultaneous multiple accesses, nothing prevents Lightroom itself from managing a lock on the records used by a given user. This is apparently what the developers of Bibble 5/Aftershot did.

Moreover, most users don't want to share a catalog but just want to have it on a network drive for some reason. This can be done easily by using the DOS *SUBST *command as described here (not tested with Lightroom 4). This way, Lightroom will not detect that the catalog is on a network drive. There will be no problem as long as nobody else tries to access the catalog while you are using it (or as long as you don't open two copies of Lightroom on two different systems pointing to the same catalog).

*I used this solution for a while but there's a problem : performance*. Accessing SQLite records locally or over the network doesn't make much difference unless the catalog is very big. But the Lightroom previews are necessarily stored in a subfolder of the folder where the catalog resides. So you'll be accessing your previews over the network. Unless the network is very fast and the server is delivering data at a high rate, you'll see a significant difference in performance.


----------



## erro

It is not only an issue of preventing *other users* from accessing your LR catalog. It is also an issue of preventing *yourself *from accidentaly opening the same catalog on two or more computers. And of course: performance as in local storage versus remote storage.

LR itself handles this though, because as soon as you open a catalog, LR will create a "lock-file" next to the catalog file. If you try to open a catalog while that lock-file exists you will not succeed, and will be told that tha catalog is already in use by another application. So... it seems Adobe have implemented a double security. It would seem to me that if LR was just allowed to have the catalog on a network drive, the lock-file should normally be security enough to prevent multiple simultaneous openings of the same catalog. But, since Adobe have done what they have done we are stuck with the situation. The subst trick, as pointed out by Patrick should work but requires one to be a bit computer savvy and "adventurous"....


----------



## jackjohn777

Thanks for all your thoughts. Unfortunately I had replied and posed a few more thoughts immediately after the first couple of posters, but frustratingly my posts aren't appearing (maybe moderation takes a long time at first) and then the discussion carries on again. Fortunately some of those posts have covered some of the items I mentioned, but if my posts suddenly appear out of synch that is why.

Thanks everyone


Edit: Strangely this has appeared instantly and my other two replies are still missing from this thread. I hope they're not lost, or even worse im being stupid and havent spotted them! I did get a message after I'd posted them saying they would go up after a moderator had checked them.

Edit 2: I see they've now appeared, so thanks


----------



## jackjohn777

One more thing just to make sure I've understood everything...

Let's accept I cant get the catalog benefits of Lightroom across ALL my different types of devices that can display photos, but if I have Lightroom on only my desktop and my macbook, and all my photos on my NAS, I presume I can still comfortably view all those photos on both devices, and would just have two different catalogs. This means if I updated a catalog on my macbook, the desktop catalog would obviously remain as it was. However if I uploaded new images via my macbook & Lightroom to the NAS, how would the desktop Lightroom recognise the new images in the NAS photo folder in terms of cataloging e.g. would they appear in some misc virtual folder with no tags etc until I've cataloged them better? 

I've also seen some mention of an ability to synch catalogs across devices, so is that official and not likely to cause issues or is that a workaround with risks like some of the other catalog solutions? If synching is fine perhaps I just do that every time I work on one device and then at least I can get the management/display benefits I wanted across a couple of devices.

Thanks in advance


----------



## erro

Do you want to *work *with your photos in LR on multiple computers/devices? Or do you want to *view *the photos on multiple computers/devices?

Working with photos in LR requires access to the catalog. And I would strongly recommend having just one catalog. Two computers with two catalogs, means having two originals. Recepie for disaster. If editing on two computers is a must, then I would recommend having just one catalog, and some sort of sync routine, and a high level of dicipline to make sure you always know which computer has the active master catalog at any given time. Never work on both computers at the same time. Know your original: there can be only one.

Viewing photos on the other hand can be done without LR. I assume you want to see the photos with the adjustments you have made inside LR? One important thing to realize, is that LR is non-destructive. The adjustments you make to your photos are never actually applied to the original. They are just stored as instructions in LR databes (the catalog). If you want to see the adjustments you can af course do so inside LR. But if you want those edits available outside of LR you have to export copies, thus creating new image files.

If viewing is what you want to do, especially with non-LR-capable devices such as an iPad, smart-phone or similar, then you don't want to run LR on those devices. Rather, you want to be able to view normal JPG-photos, exported from LR. The smartest way is probably to use LR's "publish services". With those, you can automate the export of selected photos to one (or several) folders on a disk somewhere, for example your NAS. All your computers and devices can then access and view those JPG's from the NAS. By using a "smart collection" within the publish service, you'd be able to get images to automatically appear in that folder with little more than a click of a m ouse. Would that be a solution for you?


----------



## jackjohn777

erro said:


> Do you want to *work *with your photos in LR on multiple computers/devices? Or do you want to *view *the photos on multiple computers/devices?
> 
> Working with photos in LR requires access to the catalog. And I would strongly recommend having just one catalog. Two computers with two catalogs, means having two originals. Recepie for disaster. If editing on two computers is a must, then I would recommend having just one catalog, and some sort of sync routine, and a high level of dicipline to make sure you always know which computer has the active master catalog at any given time. Never work on both computers at the same time. Know your original: there can be only one.
> 
> Viewing photos on the other hand can be done without LR. I assume you want to see the photos with the adjustments you have made inside LR? One important thing to realize, is that LR is non-destructive. The adjustments you make to your photos are never actually applied to the original. They are just stored as instructions in LR databes (the catalog). If you want to see the adjustments you can af course do so inside LR. But if you want those edits available outside of LR you have to export copies, thus creating new image files.
> 
> If viewing is what you want to do, especially with non-LR-capable devices such as an iPad, smart-phone or similar, then you don't want to run LR on those devices. Rather, you want to be able to view normal JPG-photos, exported from LR. The smartest way is probably to use LR's "publish services". With those, you can automate the export of selected photos to one (or several) folders on a disk somewhere, for example your NAS. All your computers and devices can then access and view those JPG's from the NAS. By using a "smart collection" within the publish service, you'd be able to get images to automatically appear in that folder with little more than a click of a m ouse. Would that be a solution for you?




I'm not too bothered about working (editing etc) on photos on two devices, it would be nice to be able to use my laptop or desktop as convenient, but I can easily handle just always using one if necessary. The main thing I wanted to do was be able to display my photos across lots of devices such as laptop, ipad, iphone etc etc depending on my current scenario and use Lightroom capabilities for ordering, sorting, tagging, cataloging my photo collection to help that, so that if I was on one of those devices I could easily find and select the photos I wanted to show at that moment e.g. I'm with Fred for lunch, have my ipad, and want to show him the photos I have of him. I'm not going to have a Fred Album on my NAS, so I can't do that at the moment and would need to manually search through every album I have over years looking for a pic that has him in it, which isnt going to happen, so ideally I wanted to quickly search on Lightroom and display all the Fred pics. However it seems this isnt possible from the above, so I'll have to keep using inflexible photo station on the NAS which can't tag photos, doesn't have a search facility, and can only have one photo showing in one album e.g This means I cant just bring up Fred pics on say my ipad.

Does this make sense?

Regards


----------



## erro

As far as I know, it is not possible to actually run LR on an iPad, smartphone or similar. LR requires Mac or Windows computer. Maybe there are some kind of "hack apps" available that can query LR's database (which basically is just an SQL database, though a single-user database) but I don't know if there are, and if so how they work. Anyway, if there were, and you were at a restaurant with Fred and your iPad, you would somehow need access to your LR database and the previews inorder to be able to show Fred anything. I guess theoretically you could store such stuff on the iPad, or on a USB-stick orwhatever, but then it is a matter of keeping that in sync with your "real" database and previews.

Remember: LR is single-user, so whatever you want to do that mimics anything multi-user will require some kind of syncing to occur. And that in turn will require dicipline in order to not end up with duplicated catalogs. And in worst case duplicated catalogs that are out of sync, but that both have work done to them. This leades to the dreaded "two originals" problem, and that must be avoided.

Viewing photos though, is another thing, as I wrote before. If you export photos, you don't have to use LR or have access to the catalog i norder to show the photos. You just have a bunch of JPG files that you can treat and view just as any other JPG's. The question is how you get to have those exported JPG. I guess it will be hard to sit at the restaurant with Fred, and then at the spur of the moment say to him: "Hey, lets look at all my photos of you". At least if you haven't planned for it beforehand.

But you can actually create a number of "albums" by using the publish service in LR. Assuming you use keywords for your photos, and you assign the keyword "Fred" to all photos where he appears, then you can create a publish service that looks for photos with the keyword "Fred". Once you have setup that publish service, all that is needed to update it with new photos is a mouse-click. Any new Fred-photos will then automatically be exported to the Fred-folder you've specified. Then you can access that folder (somehow) with your iPad.

Perhaps some "cloud-based" storage is what you need? In combination with the publish service. There are services included in LR for Smugmug and some others. Or if need be you can simply publish/export to your local hard disk and then upload yourself to iCloud, Picasa, Dropbox or whatever service you wish. Now that I'm writing I realize that Dropbox might be a solution: you publish to a local disk folder, and that folder is your Dropbox-folder, so it will automatically sync to the cloud. And as long as your iPad can access the Internet you can connect to Dropbox and show photos.

Those are just a few thoughts straight from my head. I too would love a complete solution where everything is available everywhere without any problems, and without me having to do anything. But, we're not really there yet.


----------



## clee01l

Presumably, if you are having lunch with Fred, you will be away from your local network. I don't think it is possible to access your local network NAS with an iPhone or iPad remotely. Even if you use an iPad/iPhone app like FileBrowser, you can only access local network files. 

My catalog contains 15-20,000 images. The (best of the) older images are packaged into sets/albums/collections and posted on a public photo host like Flickr or 500px. Other more recent images show up in my iCloud Photostream.  I can only run LR on my ancient Win7 laptop or my iMac or Win7 Desktop. If I want derivative images on my iPad, iPhone, AppleTV or GoogleTV, I need to stage them through my iCloud Photostream (1000 unorganized recent images) or sync'd through iTunes (organized into albums).  I really know of no other way to be sitting is a restaurant across town or across the country and access my images that aren't on a public website with an iPad/iPhone or other internet connected device


----------



## Samoreen

clee01l said:


> I don't think it is possible to access your local network NAS with an iPhone or iPad remotely.



You can by using a remote access program like VNC (there's a client for iOs and for Androïd) or by setting up a VPN (virtual private network) which let's you securely access your local network from a remote system.


----------



## Brad Snyder

If I absolutely had to have the pervasive Lr access being discussed, I'd consider some sort of remote screen viewer, of which there are a number of solutions available. I shudder to consider the performance. If I really wanted to I have the tools installed to run Lr on my desktop Win7 from my Android phone, but yeesh! 
(note: I see Patrick has already mentioned one solution)

At Lr's current state of development (no pun intended) I think most of the solutions we're discussing here end up causing more punishment than the original problem.

Of all the workflows I've encountered here and on other fora, I think Cletus has the most cogent practices.


----------



## clee01l

MainSoft said:


> You can by using a remote access program like VNC (there's a client for iOs and for Androïd) or by setting up a VPN (virtual private network) which let's you securely access your local network from a remote system.


I've run a VNC client on my iPad inside my home network. All I can say is that it proves the concept works. I would not use this approach in my home network because of the latency. Accessing via 3G or 4G could only be worse.  "Fred" would have finished desert by the time you got the first image on your iPad screen.


----------



## jackjohn777

Thanks for all the thoughts guys, some interesting ideas there, but it seems clear this is something that would be great to be developed for the future.

To reconfirm the point about remotely accessing files on your NAS via ipad/iphone etc, you can definitely do it as I do regularly now, and this includes photos (but the photo software just isnt too good for cataloging etc) it's one reason I got the NAS. You just need to set up port forwarding etc.


----------

