Trying to use LRC as a DAM

[james8675309]

I'm taking a wild shot in the dark here and am somewhat of a noob, please be gentle!

I currently have a very organized library of images within LRC.  I would like to be able to share this library with other people on my team, I'm thinking I make the changes in my LRC and sync somehow so they will see the updates on their end.  First off, is this possible?

I know LRC has collections and collection sets, and Adobe Illustrator can utilize libraries on CC, is there a way to do this across both programs?

Additionally, I would like to be able to utilize this library within Adobe Illustrator.  In the library window, the user would be able to select the folder in which they would like to pull images from, to use in a design.  Or in the other direction, they would be able to select the image layer and click the image title at the top of the window and it would take them to that corresponding folder.

Again, I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to the terminology and processes, any information and or help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

James

[JP Hess · Accepted solution]

I don't think Lightroom is going to enable you to accomplish the things you want to do. First of all, the Lightroom catalog is a database that must reside locally on the user's computer. The catalog contains all of the adjustments made to the images. It does not contain the images. The catalog cannot be shared with differing users at the same time.

Since the catalog does not contain the images, but rather only of the adjustments made to the images, and since the images are left untouched and in their original pristine state, I question The feasibility of using Lightroom to accomplish your second objective of integrating with other programs. Someone else may have better insight.

[Conrad C]

james8675309  wrote

I currently have a very organized library of images within LRC.  I would like to be able to share this library with other people on my team, I'm thinking I make the changes in my LRC and sync somehow so they will see the updates on their end.  First off, is this possible?

Lightroom is not really set up for this; having reliable multiuser capability is a popular feature request but it hasn't happened yet. It also looks like the direct competitors to Lightroom haven’t been able to accomplish this either.

Adobe Bridge has taken small steps in that direction. In a recent update they added the ability to centralize the cache…

You can now share a cache with other Bridge users and let them use the shared cache instead of creating a cache.

Any Adobe Bridge user can export a cache to a shared folder, and other users can import a copy of the shared cache to their local systems. Given that the systems are in synchronization, managing the cache at a centralized location lets you reuse the exported cache, without the need to rebuild the cache on different user machines.

…but to do this you would have to do your organizing and collections in Bridge, because there isn't a simple way to share organization between Lightroom and Bridge. (Metadata of individual images yes, organization no.)

james8675309  wrote

I know LRC has collections and collection sets, and Adobe Illustrator can utilize libraries on CC, is there a way to do this across both programs?

The Lightroom online photo storage that preserves Classic collections (but not collection sets) as "albums" is a separate and different online storage system than the Creative Cloud Libraries that Illustrator uses, and as far as I know there's no way to connect them. And Lightroom has zero access to Creative Cloud Libraries at this time. This may change in the future; for example, Photoshop today can open images directly from Lightroom cloud storage (in addition to Creative Cloud Libraries). If you want to nudge product teams like Illustrator in that direction, you can submit an Illustrator feature request and get others to move it up the priority list by voting for it.