Sharing photomanagement tags and goodies in a network
December 23, 2009 8:27 AM   Subscribe

I know this was previously discussed in two posts, but perhaps there are updates. I need photo management software that will allow me to view tags, updates and edits within an network.

Scene: Network of about 11 computers, a shared hard drive with all of our photos. I use Picasa and love it. How do I use Picasa in all of these PCs and share the tags, face identification etc.?

I know little about networking. But I follow instructions well!

Can not, can not, can not be online (liability and privacy issues)
posted by lifeonholidae to Technology (4 answers total)
 
If you have the files on the network (with a mapped drive, assuming Windows) it should just work. I believe picasa stores all the info in *.ini files in each directory.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:54 AM on December 23, 2009


Lightroom is smart enough to know where a file lives and then tell you whether the resource that contains that file (your network) is available or unavailable. If the network is unavailable, Lightroom will show you any cached versions of the image it contains, but it will not let you edit or process it.

It otherwise keeps tags and other information locally. You can put your Lightroom catalogs on the network. I do not know how it would behave if different people shared the same catalog, but this article explains a workflow that involves sharing Lightroom catalogs within a photography team on a network (scroll to item #10 in the article).
posted by fremen at 9:20 AM on December 23, 2009


I have my photo library on a network drive and 3 computers access it with Picasa. Two of the computers (one Linux, one Windows) edit photos frequently. I have not had any problems with this set up at all. I don't know how well that would scale to 11 though.
posted by COD at 11:16 AM on December 23, 2009


If this is a professional environment with a budget and stuff, I'd look into Canto Cumulus, a big heavy expensive Digital Asset Management piece of software, or some alternatives like iMatch and Extensis.

I love Lightroom, and as long as you make sure everyone's got the Automatically Write Metadata To XMP option checked then it should be okay.

If it's just at home, then yeah, put the photos onto a drive that can be shared by the network and Picasa should probably work. It might get iffy if two people try to edit one thing at the same time, but I have no idea. If you don't want to have a single computer running the time, you could use an external hard drive that plugs into the network. They're called Network Attached Storage or NAS, and are pretty common and relatively inexpensive.
posted by Magnakai at 3:12 AM on December 24, 2009


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