Lightroom Catalogues between Desktop and Laptop

[Wayno]

Hello,
I do all my photo processing on a desktop at home. I have signed up for the Adobe Cloud (Lightroom and Photoshop CC).
I work away, so I have started to look at purchasing a laptop (possibly another forum thread...).
If I am away at work - or travelling for that matter and I upload my RAW files to my laptop (where I will keyword, process them and save as TIFF files), whats the best technique to transfer my photos and Lightroom laptop catalogue into my Desktop catalogue? Do I need to set up a temp catalogue on my laptop?
Can anyone share their personal techniques, or provide any tutorials, You Tube or websites that could point me in the right direction for merging catalogues?
If it matters I use Windows.
Thank you.

[ricktas]

Having not done anything like this, I could be completely wrong here.

But Lightroom catalogues are just like an index. They contain details about each photo, and edits etc, but they do not contain the actual photos. So the issue I see would be that you copy the catalogue file from your laptop to your desktop, but LR would then have no idea where the photos are. It would look for them to be in the exact place they were on your laptop. ie : C/myfiles/myphotos/2015/cars etc. But even then, depending on how the LR catalogue system works deep down, this may not work, even if you have the same file structure on both machines.

Interesting question. I have recently been looking at a home cloud solution myself and was wondering how that would even work with LR. The idea being I put the catalogue and my photos on the home cloud and try and access using wifi from my various devices.

Good question Wayne and I will be keeping an eye on this thread too.

[ameerat42]

Same here! I'm all at sea for cloud computing. But if I've got the drift, a matter of synchronising your work seems to be the issue.
Would it help if your image files were put onto an external drive and this catalogued by LR, and which you could connect to either machine?

[Cris]

Funnily enough I have found a solution that works for me just yesterday. Upload photos to LR catalogue, then make a collection with the ones you like and want to work on, next thing is set up mobile sharing(oops maybe set this up first, this is done in CC), this lets me see the pics on any device running LR, so I can edit them or view them and when I get back to my work station any edits will be there-instantly, it works seamlessly and as soon as make the collection it uploads automatically to CC and is available across your devices, I am not sure but I don't think it downloads the photos, just a view and just sends any edits back to the cloud, Im a little confused by the whole thing, but it just works. I am going away next week and the ability to quickly download pics, make a collection then view them on any device to share or edit is just so easy. Hope this helps, I went to Adobe help and searched photo sharing. Heaps of videos and written instructions.

[Wayno]

I did find a useful YouTube vid this morning.
This explains a few different approaches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPOWaoqYmGo
Cheers.