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My dad is a photographer in his free time, and he's been using Lightroom to manage his photos. However, recently, we put all of our photos on a NAS drive to allow us to access them from any computer at any time. The problem with this is that Lightroom cannot load catalogs from network drives. We need support for network drives because we'd like to be able to browse the photos from any computer, and for any computer to be able to add photos to the collection.

Right now we're just syncing the Lightroom catalog file between us, but the extra step is a pain, and doing it manually makes it error-prone.

Is there any software (free or commercial) that has proper support for network drives? The only real feature I need is to be able to sort photos by date and by some sort of tags. I don't need any editing features like those found in Lightroom; my dad is comfortable using Photoshop to edit photos.

Also, if there is another solution to this that I haven't thought of, feel free to share.

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Can't you just map the network drive on your Dad's computer?

Mapping a network drive in Windows XP

Mapping a network drive in Windows 7

There is a post here about fooling light room into thinking it is a local drive

Apparently Adobe don't want more than one person at a time opening a catalog across a network. This makes sense.

You can fool Lightroom in thinking the drive is local by using:-

subst p: t:\

Where t:\ is where the catalog is and p: is the virtual drive letter you can now access the catalog through.

You can find more information on it here

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  • Huh, I actually didn't think of doing this because I didn't think it would be enough to fool Lightroom. Thanks, and I'll try it out tomorrow and let you know how it goes. Jan 9, 2011 at 9:06
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I am on the Daminion team, and would suggest that you take a look at Daminion Server.

This is a true multi-user photo-management software with network support. Daminion can manage local or shared catalogs simultaneously. You can restrict access to the database by user roles.

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  • Please always keep the FAQ, especially the part about self advertisement in mind. Thanks.
    – Bobby
    Mar 24, 2011 at 20:37
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    Murat, please read the section of our FAQ relating to self-promotion. We appreciate that you disclose your affiliation in your user profile; however, you must disclose it in any posts recommending your product, and should not only be posting answers with links to your product. Thank you.
    – nhinkle
    Apr 15, 2011 at 9:55
  • Murat - I tried your product, and it seems great, but it wasn't sufficient for me because it doesn't ignore duplicated imported files. Aug 11, 2013 at 23:48
  • Jim, the latest Daminion version doesn't import the same files twice, plus you can easily locate duplicate files after importing. Apr 29, 2015 at 8:57

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