Best Practice(s) for Laptop in Field, Server at Home? (Lightroom 3.3)

Question

Hi all!
I just downloaded the 30-day evaluation of Lightroom, now trying to get up to speed. My first task is to get a handle on where the files (photos, catalogs, etc.) should go, and how to manage archiving and backups.
I found a three-year-old thread titled "Best Practice for Laptop in Field, Server at Home" and that describes my situation, but since that thread is three years old, I thought I should ask again for Lightroom 3.3.
I tend to travel with my laptop, and I'd like to be able to import and adjust photos on the road. But when I get back home, I'd like to be able to move selected photos (or potentially all of them, including whatever adjustments I've made) over to the server on my home network.
I gather I can't keep a catalog on the server, so I gather I'll need two Lightroom catalogs on the laptop: one for pictures that I import to the laptop, and another for pictures on the home server -- is that right so far?
If so, what's the best procedure for moving some/all photos from the "on the laptop catalog" to the "on the server catalog" -- obviously, such that I maintain adjustments?
Thanks kindly!  -Scott

Answer 1

Hi TurnstyleNYC,
Yes, I think we have the same set-up.
I only need 1 LR-catalog, and that is on the laptop.
It points to the images wherever they are stored: initially on the laptop, later on I move some of them (once I am am fairly done with developing) within LR per drag&drop onto the network storage. Then the catalog on the laptop always knows they are there.
I can still continue to work on the images on the network storage (slightly slower than on laptop's hard drive) if I still wish to.
While travelling, I can also work on metadata / keywording, although without access to my home network the images themselves are offline for develop work.
2 separate catalogs would be very inconvenient, as I would always have to remember if I have some images already moved. No collections would be possible of images including some on the laptop, some on the network.
Remember: a LR catalog is just a database with entries about images and the pointer to their storage location.
You can open only 1 DB of this sort at a time.
There is no technical reason for limiting a LR-catalog - I have read of people with several hundert thousand images within one.
The only really ever growing part on my laptop with this setup is the previews folder "<catalog name> Previews.lrdata". I render standard previews so that I can do most of the work for offline-images while travelling.
The catalog itsself "<catalog name>.lrcat" grows much slower. It is now 630 MB for 60'000+ images, whereas previews folder is 64 GB.
So yes, I dedicate quite a junk of my laptop hard disk to that. I could define "standard"-previews somewhat smaller, fitting to the laptop's screen resolution, but then when working at home with a bigger external monitor LR would load all the time for the delta size, which is why I have defined standard-preview-size for my external monitor. It may turn out to be the weakness of my setup long-term.
That is all what is needed in terms of Lightroom setup.
What you need additionally to cover potential failure of drives is no matter of LR, but *usual common backup sense* along the question "what can be recreated after failure, if so by what effort?" Therefore I do not backup the previews, but very thoroughly the images themselves as well as the catalog/catalog backups, and for convenience my LR presets.
Message was edited by: Cornelia-I: sorry, initially I had written "1:1-previews", but "standard previews" is correct.