Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Technique Tuesday: Lightroom Jailbreak - Running Lightroom 3 On A Network

Good morning Everybody,

DAZ Shootout We had a great time at our KPPA Summer School this past weekend.  Yesterday's sunrise shoot was a kick at the Spindletop Mansion, one of the largest in the state of Kentucky.  At first I was a bit disappointed (they are closed on Monday) we couldn't shoot inside this beautiful location. 

But as it turned out, we found so many great locations around the exterior we ran out of time even if we had been able to shoot inside.

Beth F Senior Beth Forrester gave a great program on babies and seniors on Sunday. She had so many marketing gems in her presentation, I told her I was going to "steal" a lot of her ideas for my blog posts. She was thrilled with the idea so look for a few over the next several weeks.

Tim Priest Tim Priest took front and center yesterday showing how to shoot fashion style seniors and weddings.  Tim has a very loose and exciting style that definitely refreshes and inspires.  Be sure to check out his site right here.  His fashion style was a nice jolt of inspiration everyone enjoyed.

We returned home yesterday afternoon and it was good just to relax after two solid days of education and illumination.

It sure goes to show you that can't learn everything on the Internet.  And, you know what else?  It's a lot more fun than getting all your education in a dark little corner peering at your computer screen.  Be sure to check into events in your neck of the woods and don't miss any "in person" educational opportunities should they head your way.

OK, on with today's post...

Lightroom Jailbreak - Running Lightroom 3 On A Network

Lightroom Network YES OK gang, I've been talking this Technique Tuesday up the last few days.  I hope you enjoy it.  I'll tell you, the idea came about after my second post about the introduction of Lightroom a few weeks ago [link]. There was a comment posted by the famous Mr./Ms. Anonymous that pointed me to a Foto-biz.com [link] that showed a solution. 

What I saw was a little confusing so I gave my IT buddy, Paul Leffler, a call to see if he could bring a bit more clarification to foto-biz.com's suggestion for me.  Paul had it figured out in no time, offered to come over, and help me give it a try.  After he arrived, we had Lightroom up and running in no time.  And, it has worked like a charm!

A few caveats here:

1. This workaround IS NOT Adobe approved.

2. It seems to only work on a PC.

3. We had a few operational hic-cups but none that did not resolve easily.  Yesterday, Jennifer told me all things were great - she loves it!

In today's tutorial I'll walk you through the step by step procedure complete with lots of screen grabs for you to help minimize any missteps along the way and make things easy to follow. I'll describe how we've set up our job file structure, I think the best job file structure for a portrait/wedding studio by the way, and how that makes the whole "Lightroom a network" solution work so well for us now. Hit the PLAY button and enjoy the show.

Like I said, we LOVE how this solution is working for us.  Our headaches have all gone away.  If anything turns up that changes my mind, I'll let you know.  For now, we are all thumbs up with Lightroom 3 running on our network! __________________________________________________________

Hey folks, that's it for me today.  Don't forget about our big webcast tomorrow on Digital Design.  It’s going to be international event with photographers from over 32 countries worldwide attending! We still have a few seats left and would love to have you join us.  I'll have LaDawn and Damien standing by to field design questions in real time and Jennifer on line to help with any registration issues.   It should be a nice program.  Hope you can make it.

See ya' then,  David

3 comments:

  1. Didn't you post a question seeking a solution to this problem a year or two ago? I and others sent this very solution to you in comments way back then, and I even got an email from you telling me you were using this in an upcoming post. It has been a while so I don't have the email anymore, but glad it's working for you.

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  2. What happened to the RSS feed? I used to see the whole article, now just a partial view. If this was intentional, why not turn off RSS as it defeats the purpose to have to go to the site for each posting.

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  3. Hi,

    I'm the guy from http://www.foto-biz.com . Your occasional errors are due most likely to some networking problem. SQLite, the Lightroom database, tries to write each action to the disk on the server and most likely the disk on the server doesn't reply fast enough.

    1. Do you have a "good" switch? Ideally a managed switch, more expensive but... It should have enough bandwidth to allow for everybody at the same time to run 1000baseT. You should have a switch with at least 2x the number of ports that you need.
    2. Do you have good networking cards on the desktops? Do they run at 1000baseT. By right clicking on the networking icon > properties, you will see the speed of the networking cards. You will also see if there are errors/retransmits: should be 0, anything else is a problem.
    3. Do you have "proper" wiring. That's good cables that do NOT run near fluorescent lights?
    4. Are you using a wired network, instead of wireless? Wireless does not have the throughput to deal with multiple busy computers.
    5. How fast is your network server? Use the task manager on the server to see the Performance.
    6. Are you also writing everything to the XMP sidecar? This will increase the network load.

    This should give you enough of a starting point to track down the Lightroom errors.

    Syv Ritch
    The Business of Being a Photographer — Lightroom Q&A — Canon 7D
    http://www.foto-biz.com

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