Can a catalog be shared in Lightroom?

[billybob]

I love Adobe Lightroom, it has been a tremendous help in getting organized. However, I still face a situation where my images end up split in different catalogs due to my usage of different machines. On the road, I use my laptop. Even at home, I sometimes reach for the laptop because it is nearby rather than going into the office. Other times, I prefer using my PC with its vastly superior monitor and graphics capabilities. The problem is that I now have two different catalogs to keep track of.

Does anyone know of any solutions for maintaining one catalog for two different machines? It matters not to me whether the solution is a hackjob or is very elegant. There must be a way that I can either merge catalogs periodically or that two machines can share the same catalog through the LAN or a vpn. I am very knowledgeable when it comes to networking, so there is no need to go into great details about setting up shares or vpn or anything like that. However, I have had difficulty getting a new installation of Lightroom to use the file structure and catalog files of a previous installation, so I am assuming that the solution won't be as easy as sharing the directory structure over the network and letting both installations use it...or is it actually that easy?

I imagine that there is some built in functionality that allows for the sharing of catalogs across an organization. If Adobe is selling this product to professional organizations, I can't imagine that they would not have thought of the fact that people in different areas might need to access the same catalogs. However, I have been unable to find any documentation on such functionality.

I would love to hear ideas and solutions.

Thanks

 

[billybob]

I find it hard to believe that every Lightroom user does all their work on one PC. Somebody out there has to have some solution.

 

[Dweller]

I found this in a search. This site has a TON of good info. I need to spend some time and really see what is there. They discuss sharing a single instance of lightroom between 2 users but then in a follow up to this post he discusses how to share the database between 2 machines.

http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/05/sharing_a_lightroom_database.html

http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/05/sharing_a_lightroom_database_r_1.html

More important to me is the ability to open up the same Library from different computers, even though it wouldn’t support two or more simultaneous users on the same Library. This is because we each have our own computers and having access to all of our photos is crucial.

Both Richard and PECourtejole pointed out in comments in last post that it is possible saving the library on external file with the pictures and then it is possible to open it up with different computers by connecting the drive. I think that is a route I will be going with for the time being. I have a decent Firewire 800 drive, so the speed should be pretty good in Lightroom.