Adobe Lightroom 4.1 - Catalogs

[bwestlake]

Hi all,

 

We have recently perchased adobe lightroom 4.1, but with have encountered a problem (a major one) with the catalog, apparently it has to be on a physical location eg "C:\Users\%username%\Pictures\Lightroom" but our pictures folder for users is redirected to the H:\ Drive... Adobe have made it so you are unable to store the catalog on a network location..

 

As our students are restricted from accessing the C:\ Drive we cannot create the catalogs their, neither can we create a symbolic link to this location, i have searched on the internet and a away round is to store it on an external hdd, but being in a classroom as this is impractical as one would be needed per machine, we have a few suits where lightroom will be installed (so nearly 200 machines).

 

Anyone got any other ideas as we are stumped :/

 

Many Thanks

[Skibby]

Hi bwestlake,

 

I know this is quite an old post now but did you manage to come up with a fix for this? I am currently looking at getting Adobe Lightroom 5.4 installed in our Photography suite but we have the same problem with the redirected home drives. Our students are also restricted from accessing the C: drive.

 

If you did work out a fix for this, I'd really appreciate any suggestions.

 

Cheers.

[3s-gtech]

Some ideas:

 

Add a second HDD to each machine, with a Catalog folder only accessible to those who use Lightroom. If you're doing SSD upgrades, you may find you have plenty of HDDs going spare.

Decent memory sticks (still a faff, but cheaper than HDDs). These could be mounted internally too.

iSCSI connections to a dedicated NAS/server target (would be quite slow with many users but should work).

[bwestlake]

We created a program which copies the database to the root of the C:\ from the students Home Drive. then starts Lightroom.

When Lightroom is closed it copies it back to the students Home Drive.

[Homer]

Morning all

 

Sorry for a kind of thread revival but it's not too old so thought it would be ok - and I have exactly the same issue.

 

Has anybody else found a good solution to this one? I'm thinking along the lines of a restricted writable space on the local disk, with a program that can 'sync' the catalog files?

 

Maybe offline files could help? *shudder*

 

Any advice welcome... iSCSI is an interesting idea too

[gwildebeast]

I had the same problem, a workaround is to use the "subst" command in a script that replaces the shortcut for the program in VB something like this:

 

set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")

sCommand = "subst N: ""\\server_location_of_network_drive_for_user"""

objShell.run sCommand, 0, true

 

This seems to fool Lightroom into accepting the location as valid for the catalog folder. It does show as a disconnected network drive which can confuse users but it avoids having to mess about with new locations\drives\external media and the like. We haven't had any major issues using it like this but YMMV since it is specifically against Adobe advice to run it on a network share.

[ataylor]

I have mapped "Pictures" back to the C, I then have a log on script that will copy any data from Y:/Pictures (My user mapping) to the Local drive C:\users\%username%\Pictures, I then have a log off script which will copy the data back to their drive. From what I have tested it seems to be working ok, although the user will lose data if the computer is shut down abruptly.