Sharing a lightroom catalog - Does housing the catalog and images on an external hard drive work?

Question

I will be managing a small portion of a client's overall image workflow by updating their web prescence on a regular basis with new work and retagging/uploading old work. I believe this requires the catalog and the image library  to be housed on an external hard drive that can travel between the two of us. We are both working on PC's with LR 5.3.
The workflow would look something like this:
Client downloads new images onto external hard drive and imports into LR
"ClientCatalog" is created
Flags Picks and Creates a Collection from those Picks
Hard drive is handed off to me where I open "ClientCatalog"
Make suggested edits to images
add detailed tags and metadata
upload to various social media sites and websites
return hard drive to client
Is there potential problem with this workflow? My assumption is that if everything is housed on the external hard drive then there are no worries about the catalog containing all the latest updates. Can anyone fill me in on potential problems I might have overlooked? Are there any "safety protocols" you would add in to this workflow (besides mirroring everythign on another hard drive) that you would suggest?

Answer 1

Photwell wrote:
I ran into this problem with my own catalog a few weeks ago. I plugged my external hard drive into a different USB and everything was gone.
Not gone, just mis-addressed. It can be re-addressed as necessary. I believe it is enough on MacOs, to name the drive. On Windows, the details vary by OS version (Google for instructions) but this is for Win7:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/change-drive-letters-windows-7.htm
and it is a good idea to assign a drive letter quite a bit later in the alphabet, to restrict the chance of ever finding that letter already taken. For example, it could be X: for external drive, or P: for plug-in drive, or whatever makes sense to you...
After doing this, on re-starting Lightroom and opening the Catalog, the images will at first go offline (previously used location not found). To get them back online, it will be necessary to re-browse the parent folder for all your image folders, to reflect its new location under the new drive reference. That done, the Catalog location info for all the images and subfolders located under that parent folder, will be updated automatically. If this parent is not currently showing in the LR Folders list, you can right-click and choose "Show Parent". LR's display then reorganises to reflect this actual hierarchy.
regards, RP