dropbox

[Rooster Brother]

Can you put a Lightroom catalogue and your picture files in the Dropbox folder on a mac and a pc and have them sync properly?

[JP Hess · Accepted solution]

Some people have reported success doing this. You have to make sure that when you finish on one computer you allow enough time for the synchronization to complete. Otherwise you could end up with a corrupted catalog.

[Rooster Brother]

Thank you for the reply.

[JP Hess]

A safer and more reliable method is to have your catalog and images on an external hard drive that you can switch from one computer to the other.

[Rooster Brother]

Won't work because one's a Mac and the ohter a PC.  Might work on a flash drive though.

[ManiacJoe]

It will actually work, with two catches:

1. The EHD needs to be formatted using a file system that both the mac and windows can read and write to.

2. The catalog stores references to the image files using path names. The path names on windows and macs are different. Thus every time you change to the other computer, you will need to do a "find missing folder" on all the top-level folders in your catalog.

Using Dropbox or any other file sharing service, #2 will also apply to each of them.

[Theresa J]

I use MacDrive by Mediafor to read my Mac external drive on my PC. It works great. I even got the school I teach at to instal it on the classroom machines. We haven't any problems with drive compatibility since using this utility.

[Rooster Brother]

Thank you all for the replies.  A lot to think about.

Life is after all experimental.