Dave Daniel Photography

Ever try to open an Adobe Lightroom catalog from a network drive?  You can’t.  This wonderful design feature of Lightroom has been frustrating users since the product hit the street.  Here is my simple solution that allows you to use network-based Catalogs.

Adobe’s design requirement to use a local drive sucks for those of us that use network drives such as a NAS to manage our media files.  The way Lightroom works requires the Catalog to be on a non-network drive.  The use of multiple computers managing image information means separate Catalog files on each.  Adobe’s suggestion for a work-around was to copy the Catalog to each workstation prior to use (ugh).  This creates the real scenario of multiple Catalogs with different data.

I’ve tried a variety of solutions with either moderate or no success.  The SUBST command is a possible alternative but has limitations that didn’t meet my needs.  For those that want to try:

• SUBST G: P:\Media\CatalogPath

This places the contents of the P:\Media\CatalogPath to new drive G.  This may or may not work reliably, as LIghtroom may still see the new drive as a network resource since G: isn’t a BIOS-installed drive.  To me, solutions that don’t always work aren’t solutions.

My UNIX background told me I need the UNIX equivalent of the SYMLINK command on my Windows system  (for those that see another opportunity to flame Windows, find me Lightroom that runs on UNIX).  To my surprise, I discovered that recent versions of Windows has a symbolic link command called MKLINK!  Use the MKLINK command to create a symbolic link within your local drive structure.  For example, to create a Catalog folder on my C drive that actually links to the catalog folder on my NAS:

• MKLINK /d “C:\Catalog” “P:\Media\Catalog”

Again, this assumes the NAS is mapped to the P drive.

This does a good job of providing the Catalog from a network source, convincing Lightroom that it’s dealing with local-drive data.  But, it presents a problem with the image files being mapped to different network drives on different workstations.  Setting up the images and the catalog directories under a common, shared directory provides a solution.   For example, the Media folder contains both the “Images” and “Catalog” folders.  To create the symlink:

• MKLINK /d “C:\Media” “P:\Media”

This presents the entire NAS drive’s \Media subdirectory on the local C drive.  Again, Lightroom is convinced that the C:\Media folder is a local data store.  But remember, that folder is actually pointing to the data contained on your network.  It doesn’t copy the data.  The data being manipulated at C:\Media is really the data sitting on the network drive.  So please be careful wiehn deleting or modifying anything.  As always, using a “working” directory while maintaining an unmodified directory of your images is extremely important….and ALWAYS make regular backups!

The above symlink solution still requires the correct drive mapping (drive P in our example).  To bypass this and reference the network directory as an explicit source, use the following:

• MKLINK /d “C:\Media” “\\ServerName\Share\Media”

You can place the MKLINK command above in a batch file or add it to a script that runs to map the network drives and create any symlinks.  Once created, the symbolic link will remain in your filesystem until explicitly removed.

Hope this helps!