[Riverlady]

My laptop (4 yo HP dv7, 8 GB, i7) is about to go south (persistent overheating problems not fully resolved by several repairs in the past year) and I am considering my options. I really don't want to spend a lot of money on another laptop that will have the same overheating problems (not the money so much as the hassle and heartache of system problems) and many of them do. I'm a committed Windows person, no Macs. One thing I'm considering, and would like feedback about, is to switch over to a desktop system for most photo editing (plus a decent calibrated monitor), plus a more portable mid-range laptop, and (I got this idea from an older thread here on the forum) putting my photos and LR catalog on an external drive that can be used by either machine. The laptop use would be mostly for culling thru photos and organizing while away from home, with editing done from the desktop. Then I would use the desktop hard drive as the backup copy of the external drive. Does anybody see any problems with this? Anybody doing something like this? I am currently using LR 4.4, will likely upgrade to 6 sometime soon. I am wondering if working off an external drive will make things noticeably slower.

[jatrax]

What you propose should work, I see no reason why not. Provided you take the normal precautions about disconnecting external drives. One concern I have would be whether Windows assigns the same drive letter all the time. If not Lightroom will not find the catalog.

Speed would likely be slower but by how much I'm not sure. If the external drive is USB 3.0 it might not be huge but it will still be slower. USB 2.0 drives would I think be noticeably slower than an internal drive.

You might also look into LR mobile which is available on LR6 (and LR5 I think): https://helpx.adobe.com/mobile-apps/help/lightroom-mobile-faq.html

Or you could just copy the catalog back and forth from the internal drives and keep the images on the external which might be faster, but at the expense of some convenience. Something like this: Moving Lightroom catalogs from laptop to desktop and back

[reeftool]

I doubt if it will run much slower. Laptop drives aren't exactly speed demons either. As for Lightroom working with external drives, it should work fine. Many new laptops now come with SSD's and working off an external drive is now becoming the norm. The newer versions have features enabling this although I can't really say how well it works with version 4. It does with 5 and of course, the new LR6 and CC.

[mattt]

I currently store working copies and backups on separate passport drives. The catalogue is on my PC. I have no issues with this set up. I am careful to not confuse working copy and backup drives as the file folder structure is different (by design). When I fill the external drives I start a fresh catalogue.

I have not tried running the same catalogue on two machines.

[Wingincamera]

As for laptop heating up, my old HP had that problem but my Asus N53S laptop has no heating problem. It has always been super cool. I use a home made laptop board for when in my lap, so the cooling vents are always clear. You can connect it an external monitor if needed. It mostly works good for me. Only complaint would be this particular model max's out at 8 gigs of ram, which when in PS depending on what I am doing things can get slow. When I replace this one it will be another ASUS gaming laptop machine.

I use two external USB drives for backups, and might acquire another one for immediate 2nd copies when transferring from memory cards via Lightroom. I use LR 5 with PS CS6 and love it.

[Bruce Clark]

It must be understood the lightroom catalogue is not the images themselves but only data relating to the images. Images and cataloge must both be backed up for safety. I understand it is preferable, in most cases, to have just one catalogue. I do most of my work on a desktop and have images on two internal drives, one of which is a back up. I do need to get an external drive as a further backup. I now have a laptop with lightroom. It has its own catalogue. So far I use this for temporary on site processing only. I can see the day when I would wish to do major processing on the laptop. Then import the final images to the main computer. These images and the main catalogue are backed up. What then remains on the laptop is expendable.

There is an excellent B+H tutorial here.

You Tube

You Tube

which should prove useful.

[southlander]

Riverlady,

Has someone cleaned all the fluff out of the heat sink area?

I tore down one of our laptops some time ago due severe overheating and there was a solid 1/4 inch plug of fluff right across the heat sink (and zero resultant airflow). Cleaned that out and laptop was perfectly cool once more.

Laptops generally draw air in from the bottom, and if they end up being used on beds, floors etc as they tend to do, they basically act as vacuum cleaners and eventually the 'bag' is full.

---------- Post added 11th Jun 2015 at 10:21 AM ----------

I think LR will take a hit with moving everything to an external drive. It writes regularly to the catalogue as each edit step is stored there as well as in the DNG file or sidecar file (depending on your setup), and the previews (assuming these are shifted as well) will load more slowly. Laptop drives are not speed demons but the SATA bus is still way faster than USB, particularly for lots of small writes.

Rather than two computers, consider just buying one good laptop and plugging a decent screen into that. I run a Dell i7 laptop with a Dell 27in IPS monitor plus wireless keyboard/mouse. So far, with a 1Tb drive I still have plenty of storage. One of the beauties of using LR is that you don't end up with multiple copies of each image as the editing is non-destructive and a separate full-res copy of each final edited version is unnecessary. This keeps storage needs under control.

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Last edited by southlander; 06-10-2015 at 05:51 PM.

[davidreilly3207]

I keep my photo files on an external drive with no problems. However, I recommend keeping your catalog on the hard drive of the computer. I have tried keeping the catalog on the external drive and it caused a significant delay in preview loading, slider response and other things.

I think LR will take a hit with moving everything to an external drive. It writes regularly to the catalogue as each edit step is stored there as well as in the DNG file or sidecar file (depending on your setup), and the previews (assuming these are shifted as well) will load more slowly. Laptop drives are not speed demons but the SATA bus is still way faster than USB, particularly for lots of small writes.

I agree with Southlander.
I also use a laptop away form home. I start a new catalog each time and when I return home I Import from laptop catalog into the desktop catalog.

[Canada_Rockies]

My only personal computer is a laptop. I work with it, and I take it on site, logging in to the network when required. I currently have an ASUS P550L with 8 Gb RAM, i7 processor. It is running Win 7 Pro, downgraded from Win 8.1 Pro.

The on board drive is subdivided into two 500 Mb sectors. I have one external 1 Tb drive (from my previous laptop) in a USB 3.0 enclosure. It is the host for the second copy made on import. I have two older 1 Tb drives in USB 2 enclosures, and use a backup routine (EaseUS Backup) on a schedule. With every drive turned on and connected, I have a 4 Tb system.

Lightroom has noticeable hesitation moving from image to image. There is no difference I can detect with or without the external drives connected. The bottleneck, I believe is that the laptop does not have a separate graphics processor. My wife is running a similar specced desktop from Dell, running Win 8.1. The speed is similar.

My ASUS laptop advertises itself as having "Ice Cool" land it has never overheated. If I ever have to use it in my lap, I have a two fan USB lap table.

[Bengan]

Instead of using an external USB-drive I would suggest setting up a simpel NAS on your home network. A good NAS is rather inexpensive these days and provides extra security.


I'm using this setup with photos on the NAS and Lightroom catalogue on the computer I use the most (I'm using both stationary and laptops). When I want to switch to another computer I just import the catalogue from the most reasent backup. The only thing you will have to keep track of is that the NAS' photos resource must be mapped with the same drive letter (i e "P:") on both computers.

[mee]

I use a USB3 2 disk external RAID (ICY DOCK) for file archiving. I simply periodically connect the external unit to my desktop, open windows explorer, and copy/paste the folders from my LR folder on the desktop over to the one I have on my external setup. That way, even if my desktop tanks, I have a duplicate copy of my work on the external. And, every year, I clear off the previous year's work from my desktop (since I have somewhat limited disk space).

2 disk array means even if one chokes, I should (haha in theory) have another copy of those files. This does not protect against tornado, flood, fire, or theft of the external unit though. But those are less likely to happen than a hd failing (which I've had happen) either by mechanical parts failing or electrical storms (in my area).

NAS is another nice idea... perhaps even better than my little RAID setup... but they still were more costly last time I compared the two.

[kadajawi]

Yup. I have to clean my laptop once a year, but other than that I don't have any heat issues. Proper business laptops are also less prone to run into such problems, they are designed properly as workhorses, not as fancy good looking super slim devices that are more likely to run into problems.

A desktop should of course give you better performance, and having a proper, nice screen compared to a laptop screen (which are usually designed to save power and be slim instead of good image quality) is great too.

I use my laptop when I'm on the go with a 3 TB external drive which stores my photos, at home I plug that drive into my desktop (USB 3.0) and use it. When I'm gone for longer I copy the catalog file and thumbnails onto my laptop's SSD (this is not necessary, but since SSDs provide a TON more performance than regular hard drives... especially for use cases such as LR catalogs...), all I need to make sure is that the external drive has the same letter as on the desktop. Works flawless. When I get home I can copy back the catalog and associated files, and use the desktop.

If you want to make the desktop fly, consider getting an SSD... 250 GB should be more than enough for Windows, programs and the LR catalog, and you could have a temporary folder where you store photos you are currently working on. That's what I do on my laptop, the photos I import I import to the SSD, then I can quickly go through them, edit them, ... later I move the files to their final destination in Lightroom. It helps.