30 Mar 2008 How to store Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalogs on a network drive
Posted by Hans-Henry Jakobsen
I’ve always wanted to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to store the central library database on a network drive and be able to access it from different computers. This has not been possible because Lightroom is not a multiuser enabled software, and if you try to use a network drive you get the following error message “Lightroom cannot use the Database location you have chosen because it is located on a network volume.”
One solution to this problem is to use the good old MS-DOS subst command to map the network share. This should be done from at command prompt (cmd.exe)
subst X: \\server\sharename
- X – the new drive letter
- server – the servername
- sharename – sharename that you would like to make available to Lightroom Catalogs
Another method is to subst an already exising network drive
subst X: P:
Where P: is your network drive and X: is the new substituded drive letter.
There are however some things that have to be considered before using this solution
- Performance will be degraded because Lightroom does generate a lot of traffic while you edit and work on images
- Only one computer/user can access the catalogs since they are stored as flat-file databases (not a multiuser solution)
