Collaboration basics

A reader sent in a note about using Lightroom 2 in a multi-user environment. Since Lightroom doesn't offer network support, she wanted to know the best way to set up Lightroom to share catalogs and images with the others in her unit.

One of the ways that you can help ease the pain of sharing catalogs in a multi-user environment is to save your catalogs and images on an external drive.

In setting this up for the first time, you and you coworkers will need to do a bit of importing and exporting. If the images are on your internal hard drive to start with, you'll need to export them to the external drive. Simply select the images that you want to move and click on File>Export as a Catalog. Then give the new catalog a name and point the dialog to your external drive. You'll want to export the negative files and previews as you will most likely change the Develop adjustments after the export to your external drive.

Remember: if you are opening a Lightroom 1 catalog for the first time with Lightroom 2, choose File>Import from Catalog. 

Once you've exported your catalogs to an external drive, sharing is rather easy. Just select File>Open Catalog (Or File>Open Recent). Then select Relaunch when prompted.

With a little planning, sharing catalogs can be easy.

Enjoy.