17 Messages
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274 Points
Sun, Nov 5, 2017 4:30 PM
4
A way to share 1TB of photos with family
As a keen photographer for 30 years, have millions of photos (1TB worth). All are in LR, most are tagged with keywords, some are processed, many are not (no time).
The problem I want to address is that if my wife wants to make a photo album, or my my daughters want to look through photos of their lives, there is no tenable way to do this.
Yes, I could spend man years go through all the photos, processing the good ones, and uploading them by event to a sharing site like smugmug, zenfolio etc. This doesn't work for 3 reasons:
The problem is that photos are "locked" in lightroom, and light room is single user.
One solution is to for LR to use a multi user database (this is easy to implement with say mysql or similar), and then offer a read only LR viewer application which can access the lrcat file and photos on a shared drive or similar.
This will allow my family to search, view, download and make photo albums. Currently they have no way to do this, so none of my pics get seen by anyone except the 1% or less which I have time to publish to my zenfolio account. In zenfolio, manually re-create the hierarchy in lue of keywords, e.g.:
My suggestions are:`
I love LR for the speed of editing, but HATE it for the fact that my 1TB of photos are locked in it, and my family only can see 1% i have had time to manually upload to my zenfolio account.
NOTE: the way I did it before LR was to have my photos and lrcat file on an external iSCSI mounted NAS. I named the photoshopped version of files the same thing with "a" at the end. I gave read only access to the dirs on the NAS to my family. They then used google picassa to do their own keywording and management.
Now I have all the photos and lrcat file on a 2TB M.2 MVMe 960 pro internal SSD, and its far faster, but noone can search, browse or view the 1TB of pics. Sadly, the pics are spread across 3 lrcat files, as 1 lrcate file grinds to a halt after about 300GB of pics are imported, but thats another issue.
The problem I want to address is that if my wife wants to make a photo album, or my my daughters want to look through photos of their lives, there is no tenable way to do this.
Yes, I could spend man years go through all the photos, processing the good ones, and uploading them by event to a sharing site like smugmug, zenfolio etc. This doesn't work for 3 reasons:
- it looses all the keywords and search ability.
- I have no time to do this (it will take man years)
- If I upload an album of unedited (bad) photos, then later edit them, i have to find and update the web version, which is very manual and time consuming.
The problem is that photos are "locked" in lightroom, and light room is single user.
One solution is to for LR to use a multi user database (this is easy to implement with say mysql or similar), and then offer a read only LR viewer application which can access the lrcat file and photos on a shared drive or similar.
This will allow my family to search, view, download and make photo albums. Currently they have no way to do this, so none of my pics get seen by anyone except the 1% or less which I have time to publish to my zenfolio account. In zenfolio, manually re-create the hierarchy in lue of keywords, e.g.:
- people
- holidays
- weddings
- events
- There is no read only mode. So I cant give it to my kinds in case they accidentally delete or edit the pics. PLEASE MAKE A READ ONLY VERSION OF LIGHTROOM TABLE FOR FAMILY VIEWING!
- It has no option to make photo albums. In theory, it might be possible to download photos in LRM onto the ipad, them use them in a separate photo album SW, due to point 1 we have not tried this.
- 1TB of photos would have to be uploaded to the web, then downloaded to the device, which is on the same network as the photos. This is crazy.
- Only highly compressed version of the files are synced, not the originals (which would be needed for printing etc.
My suggestions are:`
- Add a paid-for integrate a web album, exactly like zenfolio. I.e. it allows you to mirror your collections folder hierarchy, preserves your key words, and allows hierarchical folder based permissions and inheritance. This would make it FAR easier to publish pictures in a searchable manner, to a website, and auto-update pics when I later edit/process them. My wife could make photo albums by downloading the pics she wants and using a 3rd party photobook SW. Kinds could brows the web to see their pics (and share them as they wish). Downside is having to upload 1TB of images, and having to groom them, but at least the process as a whole would be better than what is available now.
- Make a read only version of lightroom mobile. This is a poor solution for family, but at least they can view some of the photos.
- Make lrcat multi-user + read only versions of LR. One master, many readers would do for the family case. But DB on a server would be awesome for two of us to work on the same photo library (e.g My wife and I)
- Have a read only LR license. I could them give my wife a copy of the LR cat file and an external HD of the photos, and she could search, view, create photobooks etc from this.
I love LR for the speed of editing, but HATE it for the fact that my 1TB of photos are locked in it, and my family only can see 1% i have had time to manually upload to my zenfolio account.
NOTE: the way I did it before LR was to have my photos and lrcat file on an external iSCSI mounted NAS. I named the photoshopped version of files the same thing with "a" at the end. I gave read only access to the dirs on the NAS to my family. They then used google picassa to do their own keywording and management.
Now I have all the photos and lrcat file on a 2TB M.2 MVMe 960 pro internal SSD, and its far faster, but noone can search, browse or view the 1TB of pics. Sadly, the pics are spread across 3 lrcat files, as 1 lrcate file grinds to a halt after about 300GB of pics are imported, but thats another issue.
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3 years ago
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roelof_moorlag
281 Messages
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5.1K Points
3 years ago
Ok, let me pick out one item. Your last statement. I'm managing 100 K+ photo's (over 2 TB) in one single catalog (version CC 2015.12) so there must be something else going one. (I do have another catalog but that is for work of others).
And how do i have to interprer your earlier statement "I love LR for the speed of editing", is this not a contradiction with your last sentence?
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roelof_moorlag
281 Messages
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5.1K Points
3 years ago
- Changes you make on the images on your LR-desktop are automaticaly synchronized to the published version
- The published photo's are smart previews. They are a lot smaller than the RAW files so they do not fill up your mobile devices. However, you (or someone else with your adobe credentials) can develop these images on mobile devices. These edits are synchronized back to the catalog on your desktop-LR
When i read your usecase i realy think LR-desktop + LRmobile can support your workflow. Give it a try.1
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jao_van_de_lagemaat
263 Messages
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6.2K Points
3 years ago
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roelof_moorlag
281 Messages
•
5.1K Points
3 years ago
At the basketball club of my son i do the same. After a match, i put the nice shots in a collection and publish the public link to a whatsapp group. They can not alter the images but they can leave a message (that i can see in my desktop LR). Very easy and not time consuming at all. I can choose if i want them to download the images or not and after a while i stop publishing the collection.
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reed_cavanagh
166 Messages
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3.5K Points
3 years ago
There are downsides, cost of storage, keyword flattening to name two of many but it’s pretty spot on for sharing, viewing and creating new Albums etc.
I have added a feature request for collaborative working with different permissions:
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photos...
Who knows if anything like this will come, but keeping up the pressure on Adobe with requests will surely help mould this new product into what customers require.
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