How to sync Lightroom catalogs across many computers without Lightroom CC
Nov 26, 2017
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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A few weeks ago Adobe renamed Lightroom to Lightroom Classic and re-launched Lightroom as cloud connected Lightroom CC. Aside from making everyone really confused, some concerns rose about how will this actually work in terms of licensing Lightroom (just see some of the comments on this post).
As most things Adobe, everyone will probably migrate to the new Lightroom CC given enough time, but if you want to keep your Lightroom Classic installation and still be able to sync across multiple devices, Dan Watson has a solution for you.
The secret lies in combining two of the new Lightroom features: Lightroom mobile and Smart Previews.
The other trick is to make a collection inside a catalog and mark this collection as “sync with Lightroom CC”. Now, only images that go inside this catalog will sync with the other computers. The nice thing is that not the BIG raw files will get synced, but the significantly smaller Smart Previews.
On the other hand, these Smart Previews can be exported to a decent size jpg.
The bonus? You dont need to move to the new Lightroom, and can keep your standalone installation.
[Sync Lightroom Catalogs & Images Across All Your Devices | Dan Watson, h/p Pratik Naik for the tip]
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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9 responses to “How to sync Lightroom catalogs across many computers without Lightroom CC”
Thanks for the feature! Hopefully Adobe continues to invest in Lightroom Classic and keeps features like this around because it personally found CC lacked way to much for me to use it
I perhaps missed something but I don’t see what is new here or what is even related to latest Lightroom CC… all that is shown was already possible from first CC version of lightroom (AKA “classic” from now on) and that was even the point of CC, no ?
I fail to see how this syncs your catalog. It does nothing for the actual lrcat file that holds all the data. Try this instead:
Store your LR Classic catalog file AND your preferences in a cloud enabled sync service folder like Dropbox, Box, or google Drive. Storing these files/directories and enabling the service on multiple computers will keep you catalog file up to date everywhere AND you’ll have access to all your presets, etc. because it syncs preferences too. “But this doesn’t address my files” you say? Keep reading.
Once this is done, to sync actual workable image files, sure…you can use the LR Mobile sync…OR, depending on the amount of storage in your sync softwars’s service account, you can selectively sync your Smart Previews, and even your Previews folders (located in the same directory as your catalog file) as well. When you do an import, make a new collection of whatever images you want to be available on your other editing machine(s) and generate Smart Previews for them. Those files will sync to, and be workable on your other computer(s) without needing access to the original RAW file’s drive.
I do this so I can use my home MacBook Pro as my primary import/editing machine, but sync my catalog, preferences and working image collections (I don’t generate previews for ALL images, just my working ones that I’m delivering to a client, to save space and time) to my Windows tablet that I take on the go with me. It works flawlessly. The ONLY caveat is that you need to make sure you close your catalog and that the sync process has completed to the other devices before you open the catalog on another machine, or you’ll end up with conflicting files. In my setup, this is generally a pretty quick process whenever I need/want to swap to my more mobile computer. I’ve been doing this for the last 3-4 years without any issues, PLUS it give me the added benefit of having automated backups of my catalogs.
This is the story, it actually addresses the title of the article in a workable way! Thank you.
Classic can only sync with one catalog at a time…
Not if you do it my way, below. You can sync as many catalogs as you have space for in your third party sync software account.
That isn’t new and isn’t syncing the files with multiple catalog…your just opening the same catalog in multiple places.
I don’t understand what you mean. I’m not saying anything is ‘new’ and I’m not sure why, or how, you would sync images with multiple catalogs. Please enlighten me.
My understanding is that in order to have any one image file appear in multiple catalogs, you need to import it to each catalog. It’s always been this way. I don’t see how the CC version accomplished anything different. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re wanting to do?
Hannah Wilson