3 licences purchased... no conectivity between licences and current catalouge... HELP!

Question

Our office recently purchased 3 licenses of Lightroom 2 so that we can use it as a company asset management software for our photo library.  We have 3 staff that will need to have access to the same catalogue to make imports and changes to our assets.
When we called Adobe to inquire about if the changes made by the 3 staff would be reflected in that catalogue we were told that it would be captured.  We have the photos on a network accessible to all, have downloaded the software on two desktops, and my desktop has it accessible to me, but my colleague doesn't have access to the catalogue on her terminal.
I spoke to Adobe technical support, and they are indicating that the interconnection will not be possible unless the catalogue is copied into her terminal, and that not changes I make will be reflected in her catalogue and visa versa.  This was the whole reason we purchased this software... I have been on hold with Adobe for 40 minutes... anyone have any suggestions or information to help me?  I'd really appreciate the assistance!
Kristin

Answer 1

Unfortunately you're stuck. Lightroom is really only a single user product and catalogs cannot be on network disks without major hackery. So if you want to use it in your setting, you'll have to hack your way around it. You would have been better off using Bridge ( which would work great in this limited scenario) or a product geared towards digital asset management (Cumulus and the like). It's bad that Adobe initially told you it would work as this is well known to not be a feature.
That said, there are ways you can make this work part ways without copying the catalog all the time and without moving to another product. You can enable the writing of metadata to files. Either you do this automatically or manually (Save metadata to file in the metadata menu). What will happen is that Lightroom will write xmp files next to (or into if they are dng, tiff, psd or jpeg) the selected originals or every time you make a change (if you have automatic writing enabled). You can make the other copy of Lightroom then read in those files (Read metadata from file) and all changes to development and other metadata will carry over. If you have automatic writing enabled, I think Lightroom will throw up a warning or put a little badge on the file to warn you that the metadata on disk is different from the catalog, so that you can read it from the files.
There are caveats here which are all related to the standard parallel working problems. If you both work on the same file at the same time, one of the sets of changes will be lost in the end.