Using PM and LR on multiple computers

[david3616]

I am an amateur who is just (tentatively) switching from Apple's consumer Photo program (successor to iPhoto), to a combination of PM 5.0 and LR 4.  I have a 13" MacBook Pro that I take with me while traveling and use for uploading camera cards (Nikon NEF files) into an external, portable LaCie drive attached (by Thunderbolt) to the  laptop.  I have PM and LR working well together on that computer.

On my return, I more or less (I forget my procedures), started again on my 15" MacBook Pro laptop (the larger screen is nice).  I believe I copied the LR Catalog files over to the larger laptop, while keeping the photos on the same LaCie portable external drive.  Things seem to be working well here also--although at first I was losing some of the PM-generated star and color ratings--basically, I used a separate download of PM that wouldn't have communicated with the PM on the smaller laptop but which might have read XMP files back from the transferred LR catalog files, since most of the metadata showed up in the second PM installation (on the larger laptop).

Okay, so now everything seems to be working--both in PM and LR--on my larger laptop. The photos still sit on the same external, portable LaCie drive (which I temporarily backed up in a Time Machine backup).   Eventually, I will get back to the city where my desktop 27" iMac is located, to which are attached two 4 TB external drives (one for Time Machine, and the other for media file backup).  Ideally, without having to repeat work on thousands of photos, I would like to end up with my master files on the external drives attached to my iMac desktop computer.

All this comports with the Camera Bits PM license that allows downloads to three computers, using one computer at a time.  However, since there is no way that I know of to synchronize multiple computers in PM and LR--and since I don't even know how to transfer data from PM on one computer to PM on another computer--I think I am asking for trouble trying to work on all these computers, when I have things working on one of them.  I could just work on one, then export the final products into wherever I want--selected photos might even go into Apple's Photo program so that I have my best shots on my iPhone, iPad etc.

Does anyone have any workflow experience that includes working on multiple computers during the course of handling thousands of shots from an event or travel location or the like?  I move around a lot and live in two cities--so doing everything on the desktop is not practical for me.

Looking at online tutorials regarding using multiple computers for workflow, I have so far only found ones on the different ways to move Lightroom around.  Those work for me, but I haven't figured out how to have PM tag around in tandem.

[Kirk Baker]

David,

Photo Mechanic is a browser and does not keep a separate database for storing metadata changes.  All changes are either written to the images themselves or to XMP sidecar files residing in the same directory as the images are located.

If the drive that you edit on your laptop is disconnected from your laptop and mounted on your desktop system, you should see all of the changes you made on the laptop on your desktop system.  If you were to then copy the folders on your laptop's external drive to your desktop computer's external drives then all will be the same for both drives (though the directory structure may differ, the metadata changes you made will still be there.)  As for Lightroom, you'll likely need to reimport the images from your desktop's external drive into Lightroom on your desktop computer to make it see these new files.

HTH,

-Kirk

[david3616]

Thank you, Kirk.  This is very helpful, and you have answered my question.

Unless I am wrong, it does seem, though, that if one wants to make use of IPTC Stationery Pad saved templates from one computer, when going to another computer one would want to copy the related PM Metadata ... XMP files over to the second computer.  Otherwise, it seems one would need to re-enter the stationery fields manually on the second computer if one is continuing to apply metadata to more photos in same folders.  Or is this step not necessary?

David

[Kirk Baker]

David,

Unless I am wrong, it does seem, though, that if one wants to make use of IPTC Stationery Pad saved templates from one computer, when going to another computer one would want to copy the related PM Metadata ... XMP files over to the second computer.  Otherwise, it seems one would need to re-enter the stationery fields manually on the second computer if one is continuing to apply metadata to more photos in same folders.  Or is this step not necessary?

If you want to use the same IPTC Stationery Pad on multiple computers, you'll have to get those settings from one system to the other.  You can save the fields in the IPTC Stationery Pad to a XMP file which you can copy over to your other computer, or put on a shared drive.  It is a text file so you can also use things like email (attach the file) or Dropbox to send the file from one system to another.

If you want to copy more of your preferences, you can export your Preferences from one system to a PMX file and import it on the other system.  You can do this as often as you like.

http://wiki.camerabits.com/en/index.php?title=User_Manual_Flat_View#Exporting_Preferences
http://wiki.camerabits.com/en/index.php?title=User_Manual_Flat_View#Importing_Preferences

HTH,

-Kirk