Fortunately, I’m the only one with write privileges on the photos and the photo folder on the server. So I am the rules.

Carl

I am glad to hear that you are ok with this answer. All too often I find that photographers in your shoes do no take the news that Lightroom is not a network-ready application well! It’s one of the things that I would make much more prominent if I wrote Adobe’s product literature. Working with Bridge is an adequate solution but you and your colleagues should make list of rules so that their activities do not confuse your Lightroom Catalog. If someone, for examples, renames a photo or moves the file from folder to folder it is going to upset your index…

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David Marx

I know that most everybody here who has need of photos has Bridge loaded on their computers and, indeed, that’s how I had been managing pictures before I moved to Lightroom. So they can search by my keywords and retrieve accordingly. I’ll just manage the catalog from my Mac using Lightroom.

Thanks as always for your prompt reply and your helpful advice.

Carl

Harsh truth here. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is not a network ready application. Photoshop Lightroom Catalogs will not run off a server! This program is absolutely not designed for this sort of shared environment. That said your colleagues could use a product like the Adobe Bridge to search through the images on the server without the need for access to your Lightroom Catalog. It could get messy though….

If shared access is your ultimate goal then you need to carefully investigate all of the options including other software that is intended for this sort of work environment. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but this program was never intended for this purpose.

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David Marx

Best,

Carl

Start by going to “All Photographs” in the Library Catalog Panel. Make sure that all your other filters are turned off and then open up the Metadata Filter. Set the first panel to Date. I also suggest setting the View options for this filter panel to Hierarchical and the Sort order to Ascending. You should now be able to see all of your images based on the file’s capture date. Turning on the little padlock in the far upper right of the filter bar might also help keep this filter active no matter what folder you visit.

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David Marx

Antarctica
Penguins
Mountains
Autumn
Desert
etc…..

Unless I’m missing something it seems I have to go into each “sub-folder” and do a search. I cannot find a way to select the main “Photo Folder” and have it do a search of my entire catalog, all the “sub-folders”. I do only have one catalog.

What, if anything am I missing?

Thanks!

1) how would you search for a date plus a keyword (ie all photos of X taken in March 2009)?

2) how do you distinguish between an “and” search (a photo of X and Y), an “or” search (X or Y) or a “not” search (X but not Y)

3) does the metadata travel with your photos as they go in to PS and are later saved as .psd? what about photos that are exported as jpegs?

Random side thought – if your photos start out as DNG, are brought into PS and saved as PSD or TIFF, and then eventually saved as JPEG for output to the web, etc – does your catalog contain all three versions of the same photo?

Thank you!
Meredith

Using the Caption box is an adequate solution. You might be able to store some of this information using Collection Sets. You might also find John Beardsworth’s Big Note Plug-in useful for this task.

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David Marx

My question is somewhat tangential to this very helpful posting. I have been keeping notes about images (e.g., number sold, print version) in the caption line in the metadata. I realise this is less than ideal (do I really want to include this in an image that I am emailing to a show?) and am wondering if there is any place in LR 3 (other than in the metadata) where one can keep very brief notes about images.

Many thanks,

Jane