Share your catalogues
Can I share Lightroom catalogues over Adobe’s Creative Cloud?
I’ve not subscribed to the Creative Cloud, so I may be exaggerating or misunderstanding what’s happening, but the problem sharing catalogues over the CC seems to be that it can only upload files, not folders. This doesn’t work too well when you want to share what you’ve done in Lightroom. Ideally you’d just select the images and use File > Export as Catalog, ticking the Include Previews box, and Lightroom would create a working copy of your catalogue. Share it on the CC and the other person would then be able to add keywords and metadata or make selections and be able to see you pictures without access to the originals – thanks to the catalogue’s previews. The trouble is, CC won’t upload the previews folder – it’s a folder.
The solution is easy – zip the folder created by File > Export as Catalog. Or use Dropbox.
I’d be interested to hear any experience of doing this. One issue is with unzipping. If a catalogue zipped on Mac is received on Windows you seem to need to go into File Properties’ Advanced tab where you should untick Encrypt Contents to Secure Data.