Today’s Question: A friend recently told me he was using Lightroom 5 with smart previews and Dropbox to synchronize his Lightroom catalogue. That is, he put his catalogue in Dropbox, set up smart previews in Lightroom and was able to work on his laptop and have it all synced to his main computer where all the original images were stored. I think i understand the concept but was curious about your take on the subject.
Tim’s Quick Answer: This absolutely works, but it does make me a little nervous. In concept, provided you have an adequately fast Internet connection (or aren’t generally in a tremendous hurry), you can synchronize your Lightroom catalog via Dropbox (or a similar service) and access your Lightroom catalog across multiple computers. In fairness, I’ve never experienced any problems when synchronizing a Lightroom catalog via Dropbox, and I’ve never heard of photographers having any serious problems. But it does make me nervous to take this approach.
Tim’s Quick Answer: This absolutely works, but it does make me a little nervous. In concept, provided you have an adequately fast Internet connection (or aren’t generally in a tremendous hurry), you can synchronize your Lightroom catalog via Dropbox (or a similar service) and access your Lightroom catalog across multiple computers. In fairness, I’ve never experienced any problems when synchronizing a Lightroom catalog via Dropbox, and I’ve never heard of photographers having any serious problems. But it does make me nervous to take this approach.
More Detail: When you access a Lightroom catalog (or other files) “remotely” using Dropbox (or a similar service), you aren’t actually working directly with the files on an Internet-connected server. What’s actually happening is that you are accessing the files locally on your computer, but those files are being synchronized via Dropbox.
So, for example, you could place your Lightroom catalog files in your Dropbox folder, and then access those files via several different computers. But when you do so, the files are actually copied to each of those computers. So you’re actually accessing the files locally, but they are being synchronized across multiple computers via Dropbox.
The biggest challenge here is that the files related to your Lightroom catalog can get rather large, especially the preview files. This can cause the synchronization to be rather slow, depending on the speed of your Internet connection. The key thing to remember here is that if you have updated your Lightroom catalog on one computer, you can’t make updates on another computer until the synchronization is completed. In theory the service (such as Dropbox) that is performing the synchronization won’t let you update a file (such as your Lightroom catalog) until the synchronization for that file is complete. But trusting this limitation makes me nervous, and waiting for the synchronization to complete could involve considerable time with a large set of catalog files on a slow Internet connection.
So, again, this is perfectly feasible, but potentially problematic. I’ve performed considerable testing using Dropbox to synchronize a Lightroom catalog across multiple computers without any difficulty, but I don’t feel comfortable enough with this solution (especially considering potential latency based on the Internet connection) that I’m willing to use this approach with my “real” Lightroom catalog.