Bridge over troubled water
Co-ordinating Lightroom work on two computers isn't as easy as it could or will be. The need for portability is well understood, and I loved the beta's Binders concept, but it was right to sacrifice it for Folders, and no doubt there'll soon be a better way to move images and metadata between systems.
Dan Dill shows how you can currently synchronize Lightroom libraries on two Windows computers without simple copying of libraries and setting up identical drive structures. It relies on importing your images into Lightroom via Windows shortcuts:
The root of my image folder tree is D:Photos on an internal disk of a workstation, and Z:Photos on an external disk of a laptop. The Desktop shortcut on each machine is named Images, and it points to D:Photos on the workstation and to Z:Photos on the laptop. With this setup in place, when I import files into Lightroom (by reference), I navigate to them through the Desktop shortcut, as Desktop:Images…. For example, when I point Lightroom to the image folder
It would be interesting if Mac users could do the same with OSX aliases. Somehow I think the method might struggle to help those of us with a Mac laptop and PC desktop….