Anyway to sync just my presets between pc and laptop WITHOUT storing them with the catalog?

[masplin]

My pc contains a huge number of photos so I dont want to store the whole catalog and images on my laptop. i use my laptop on trips to do some post processing and then export that small catalog and import into my main catalog when I get home. All I want is my presets and my preferences to be the same.

I assume the normal way people achieve this, without cutting and pasting, is to put their catalog on dropbox and then tick the store with catalog box.  However then I'd have to use the same catalog which wont work as images are not on my laptop. If I don't do this my presets are back on my c\users drive etc which cant be put on dropbox.

Is there any solution to this as seems a no brainer to sync the application and not the actual images?  Can you make a dropbox folder mirror a local folder or something?

Thanks for any advice or a suggestion i can vote for

Mike

[richardplondon]

See previous question about this:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2046896

[masplin]

Yup I read that before i posted my question as doesn't answer the question. So the only places you can have the presets is a) on C drive b) with the catalog.  Seems bizarre that this hasn't been address in the whole CC thing like it has with photoshop

[masplin]

Actually you say in that post that you can use dropbox to sync these folders, but i can see how without then being in the same location as  the catalogue? Unfortunately the catalogue isn't in a folder so you can turn off the synchronisation to avoid the pc and laptop catalogues conflicting.

Thanks

Mike

[richardplondon · Accepted solution]

masplin  wrote

Yup I read that before i posted my question as doesn't answer the question. So the only places you can have the presets is a) on C drive b) with the catalog.  Seems bizarre that this hasn't been address in the whole CC thing like it has with photoshop

Photoshop's settings are accessed locally from the C: drive just the same as Lightroom's are; it all still works fine when you don't have an internet connection. They are not accessed directly from the cloud.

The only difference is that with Photoshop a mechanism is provided which can COPY those settings to the cloud, and also can copy them from there into another computer.

Precisely that can be achieved e.g. with Dropbox: syncing the central folder in question (where LR presets etc live, that are seen from any Catalog), with your Dropbox storage while the same also happens for the corresponding folder in the other computer.

There is no need to "store presets with Catalog" in order to do this.

The way Dropbox works locally, is that a special folder is made and anything put inside there, syncs with the cloud - both ways, as required.

If what you put in there is a "symbolic link" pointing to another folder or to a file somewhere else, then that can also be synced. It would be necessary to do the same steps for both the computers involved.

Links:

https://www.howtogeek.com/194431/how-to-sync-any-folder-to-the-cloud-with-symbolic-links/

http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/sync-other-folders

However that sounds to me like trouble. My preferred way would be to use a local sync utility between the Dropbox folder and the user's Lightroom settings folder.

So Dropbox would keep the contents of the local Dropbox folder up to date between the computers, then each computer would replicate that against the real Lightroom presets (etc) folders in the user area.

Complicated? sure, a bit, but worthwhile if it gets the job done.

Would it be better still for Adobe to provide a built-in way for LR to carry this out intelligently? ABSOLUTELY.

[masplin]

Perfect. It was the symbolic link I hadn't heard of

Thanks a lot