Anybody know whether you can run LR entirely from a USB3 portable drive?

[ken610]

I want to be able to run my LR on any computer. I have multiple USB3 portable drives, and a new Win10 laptop, not Mac. I also have a small powered USB3 hub, so I can attach multiple portables. I will be traveling, and using my laptop, but it it breaks, I want to be able to go to a library or borrow a computer from a traveling companion. Anybody have any experiences, good or bad, with this idea?

[JimUSNY]

you can run it from any drive, may be a bit slower on a usb drive, you would have to create a catalog though? not sure how that works using CC if thats what your using.. I guess if you make a catalog on your computer using the drive, and if that stuff gets saved in the cloud it may be there no matter what computer you use

[ken610]

Thanks for your reply, Jim. I'm using the non-cloud version. I want to be able to have the full install, catalog, and image files on one 2T drive. I can clone that whole drive as a backup of the whole works. On my coming Antarctica whale survey trip, I need to be able to develop the best of the day's shots, add more data to EXIF, watermark, and export them to another computer, where another team will assemble an ongoing photo ID catalog, so we can see whether we are encountering the same individuals as we go. We will also be collecting oceanographic data using CTD, and getting DNA samples of many whales with the snotbots from Woods Hole.

I see that you also shoot E-M1. What do you think is the best way to add GPS data to each shot?

Thanks for your help.

[Godfrey]

Thanks for your reply, Jim. I'm using the non-cloud version. I want to be able to have the full install, catalog, and image files on one 2T drive. I can clone that whole drive as a backup of the whole works. On my coming Antarctica whale survey trip, I need to be able to develop the best of the day's shots, add more data to EXIF, watermark, and export them to another computer, where another team will assemble an ongoing photo ID catalog, so we can see whether we are encountering the same individuals as we go. We will also be collecting oceanographic data using CTD, and getting DNA samples of many whales with the snotbots from Woods Hole.

I see that you also shoot E-M1. What do you think is the best way to add GPS data to each shot?

Thanks for your help.

Olympus has an app for iPhone (and likely Android but I don't have one of those) that can help you integrate GPS data from the phone with the photos from the camera. Another strategy for GPS data is to use an iPhone to snap a photo at every site, making sure to synchronize clocks on the iPhone and the E-M1. That way you can import the photos from the iPhone, import the photos from the E-M1, align them by date and time, then propagate the iPhone's GPS settings to all the E-M1 files. Not as accurate, but easy.

I don't know about Windows, but on OS X I can put the Lightroom app, the catalog, and my files all on an external drive. In the Lr Preferences, set it to store presets with the catalog ... that writes any presets into a folder inside the catalog folder rather than in a centralized location, on a per catalog folder basis.

Lr will inevitably store some information in whatever personal account you're running from on the computer system you're using. It's usually cache data and settings. On OS X this is ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/... I don't know where it puts this stuff on Windows. As you move from one machine to another with the external drive, you'll simply be using the last setup of this data on the system and in the account you're using.

G

[ken610]

Thanks, Godfrey for all of this. I will try these tips this week and let you and the group know how they work on PC notebook and Android phone.