Using the same Adobe Lightroom catalog files over your network

30 June 2009, Photography

If you're anything like me, you have multiple computers in your house. If you're a fan of organization, you probably have all your photos organized on one hard drive. With Adobe Lightroom, you can not open a catalog file over your network. You can't even map a network drive in windows and open it either. Lightroom knows its a mapped drive. Here is a solution on how to get around this problem.

Blogged By:

Team Louish

You've probably seen this error if you've tried to open a catalog file over your network:

In my example above, my Y: drive is a Mapped Network Drive. To solve this problem, we're going to mount the drive using a different method. In Windows, you can open your command prompt (Run / cmd / enter), and enter the following command:


SUBST L: \\COMPUTER_NAME\L

On a Mac,


mount_smbfs -W workgroup //user@SERVER/L /L

Make sure not to leave Lightroom open on one computer and then open the same file from another computer.

On a PC, if you want the mount to stay connected after you reboot your computer, place a .bat file in your startup folder with this code:


@ECHO OFF

SUBST L: \\COMPUTER_NAME\L

CLS

EXIT

TIPS:

Its key to use the same drive letters when mounting your new drive over your network, this way, Lightroom will find your photos since the drive letters match.
Make sure you're using the same Lightroom version on both computers

Tags: lightroom, networking

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