Using multiple computers coupled with cloud storage or On1 360
Hi,
I have a desktop Mac and a portable Mac which both have On1 photo Raw which I have just recently purchased. I wondered whether you could let me know the best way to use both machines effectively to edit and access photos. I think I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of solutions and wondered what you thought?
First suggestion would be to use either Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive (I’m not aware of any other cloud solutions supported by On1) on both machines and use that as shared drive on both machines with sidecar files enabled. Once the editing process is finished then transfer them to a long term storage solution such as a NAS or Qnap as those cloud storage solutions could otherwise get a bit expensive.
A second suggestion is to use On1 360 on all my devices by uploading the photos with sidecars enabled on any of my devices and then be able to access these photos from any devices, when I have finished editing then move them from On1 360 to a NAS or similar with their edits/sidecars intact?
I wondered what your thoughts were as I’m new to On1 software or is there an alternative way that I’ve not mentioned?
Thanks for your time
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Using the cloud would work, but it would be slow accessing your photos. 360 is designed for this and should be faster, but there is the extra cost.
If you haven't seen them, there are a few videos that might give you a better idea about 360.
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I have a similar setup, but, use a totally different approach. I use an external drive for the images which I can also carry around when needed. I keep this external drive in sync with my iMac and another backup drive on my network.
I import all my photos to the external drive, cull out on my laptop and then sync it across the desktop and network drive. Of course, ON1 will scan and pick up the new files on the desktop after the sync.
Considering a 60 MB per image file (D850), cloud or any kind of reasonable previews is not really feasible in practice for me.
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Thank you both for your comments. Yes On1 360 does look a good solution but as you say the price and also the 200Gb does’t seem very large to house large amounts of photos however I get the impression it is more used as a temporary solution to edit across multiple devices and then move to a more permanent storage space?
Nitin Chandra does On1 just track changes when using the external drive? For example, if you do edits on a laptop with the external drive and then plug it in an iMac and carry on editing will On1 recognise the edits you have already done on the laptop so you don’t have to start again due to the sidecar files created? How do you sync it across the desktop? Using a cloud service? Thanks
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Chris, for ON1, you will have to spend some time on the initial setup for different systems. The current ON1 implementation uses different hashes for different directories and system and you cannot simply copy the catalog and previews as you might be able to in other apps. Also, you cannot change the base path of the catalog without triggering a rebuild of all previews.
In short, the only thing that is common across systems is the .on1 file which contains all the edits and metadata and that is all that needs to be synced across.
Now that we have the background, in my case, I have all my images in one top-level folder in which images are arranged into folders by year/month/day. I use an open-source application call FreeFileSync (multi-platform) to sync this folder across to my backup drive and my iMac.
Now we get to step 1 for ON1...Just sync all the image folders to your iMac (any directory) from your external drive (which I use as my primary working drive and I have ON1 catalog the main folder on it from my MacBook Pro).
Then, run ON1 on the iMac and add the same folders to the catalog as you did on the laptop using the local copy of the images.
Once the previews are built on the iMac, both your systems have ON1 running with the same set of images although different copies.
Now, when you edit any image on any system, just sync the 2 systems to make sure the .on1 files are copied over to the other.
When ON1 is started up, it scans all the catalog folders for any changes and will pick up the new .on1 file and apply that.
FreeFileSync can do a "smart" sync both ways by the date/time in case you use both systems to edit. In my case, I generally edit on my laptop with the external drive and do a one-way sync (mirror) to the desktop and run ON1 there to make sure all new edits are picked up and rendered.
On occasion, when I make edits on my desktop, I just manually copy over the .on1 file to my external drive.
Now, to your specific question...The above applies excepting for the FreeFileSync part.
You will have to run ON1 with the external drive on the laptop and then the desktop to catalog and create previews of the images on your local drives (for both systems).
Once that is done, then, yes, ON1 will pick up all the new images and edits from the external drive regardless of which system you made the changes.
The only issue using the same external drive is that you would not have any backup which can be tricky in case of any problems.
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Rather than having multiple copies of my image files and their edits and trying to keep them all in sync I would just put all my photos on an external drive that I can connect to which ever machine I want to use for doing my editing at that time. If you're working on both Mac and Windows systems format the drive for DOS as the Mac can read & write that natively. This will eliminate a whole lot of additional drive space requirements as you'll need to backup only that external drive rather than having backups for each machine plus the cloud storage space needed. As Nitin noted, each time you connect it to a different system after making edits on the other system, Photo RAW will pick up the edits from the .on1 files and update that system's internal database for tracking the edits.
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Just a clarification...The image copies are backups as well. I keep a 4 level backup. No, I am not a professional photographer, but, I do have images that have enough value to do that :)
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Thank you for your detailed responses, that all makes sense I think. Can I ask Nitin Chandra, do you catalogue all of your photos? I thought cataloging files is optional and your can still edit/store files without having to catalogue them all?
Would using a NAS drive alleviate sharing the external drive between desktop and laptop? Would this enable both computers to share photos and edit them?
Thank you
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In my case, Chris Hesketh, yes, I catalog all my photos into one catalog in LR. All my images are renamed on import to a custom filename, into a custom-defined directory structure and a generic preset applied to all. Then, all are geo-tagged as well including earlier scanned photos and when we did not have GPS locations. All images are also rated and keyworded.
Now, I can find any particular image I want by almost any criteria across 2 decades. This also allows me to cull out some older images (wildlife) since I might have far better ones in more recent times (I guess we all learn and improve with time and experience). I also contribute images for academic purposes and when someone asks me for a particular species (insects or otherwise), I can find all of those in a matter of seconds.
I spent most of my time during the lockdown and culled out my collection to around 50% of what it was for wildlife (100k+ images). I also have some videos as well...From the 3gp times (on mobiles to the first VGA cams to my current D850). All tagged now.
This kind of management is not possible without a reliable and stable DAM.
I have a NAS where I keep all my a backup of all my stuff...Code, documents, virtual machines, software as also images. The issue with any such storage is that when you access any current camera raw files, it would not be practical unless you are using a 10 Gbps ethernet (which I don't have currently). The other issue is that I do value my image collection and as an IT professional, I know the value of backups...Regardless.
Therefore, I use the same image set (different copies, synced on a daily basis) on my iMac and MacBook Pro. With LR, I just import all new shots, do the basic culling/editing/tagging etc and simply sync the images and catalog to my other system. Hardly takes around 5 mins to transfer over the gigabit ethernet. Initially, I ran LR on both machines with the same catalog and images (different copies) and set LR to build all previews overnight. Depending on your images, it can take a full 24 hours or so...But, that is just the one time. Since then, the process above works fine and both machines build the incremental previews. Although, I can also sync the previews in LR (works fine), but, building just the newer image previews is faster than syncing those across.
Yes, at least in LR, I can reliably use the same image source across any number of machines and I actually keep a copy of the catalog (current) on the external drives as well. This allows me to take the drive to any other system that has LR, open the catalog on the external drive, set the image path (if needed) and then search across the catalog for whatever it is I might be looking for.
You can do the same in ON1, well...Similar since there is no catalog or previews that you can simply copy across to a different system. You would have to catalog the same image set on different computers and make sure you have all the .on1/xmp files that would contain your edits and keywording etc.
I hope the above helps in answering why I catalog all my images and how and why I use copies of the same image set across machines.
Forgot to add that I have also tagged all faces in my collection, so, I can find people as well...LR has this, ON1 might add it sometime in the future...
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Chris,
To clarify, you DO NOT have to copy all files to each device as Nitan says. If you store your photos on a NAS AND have sidecar files turned on, any computer with On1 that has access to the NAS and has sidecar files enabled can see and edit those photos stored on the NAS without having cataloging turned on. That is the beauty of the sidecar files vs a Lightroom style catalog.
For example I don't have a NAS but I have my photos stored on a SSD drive on my desktop PC. I have that particular drive shared on my local network. I have On1 installed on my desktop and two laptops all with sidecar files enabled. When on my LAN each device can see the Photos and any edits made by any of the other machines. Note only one machine should edit at a time though.
Cataloging is really only necessary if you would like the ability to search all folders at once. That said if you wanted to catalog the NAS on each of your devices you could but certainly not necessary.
One other comment, a shared drive from you desktop might be a little faster than a NAS but either way will work.
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Thank you Nitin Chandra for that very detailed explanation, I appreciate the time it has taken for you to explain!
David Kick I'm really struggling to try and get my head around what the benefit of cataloging is in On1. I understand that LR functions completely on a catalogue based system and that you can have LR reference that catalogue to the original images etc. But with On1 I know that it can browse your hard drive and create sidecar files for each photo which I can see the benefit of it as you are not dependent on a catalogue for example if that catalogue became corrupted etc. So what's the point of cataloging in On1? How is it different to LR? I've read you can choose to just catalogue one folder which I can sort of see why say if it was a wedding but why catalogue in On1? Maybe I just don't understand?
Thanks
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Catalogs in ON1 allow for searching beyond just what is visible in the Browser window. Without a catalog you are limited to searching only the current Browser view. They also allow the Browser to display the contents of any Sub-Folders within the currently viewed folder. Without a catalog you cannot do a keyword search to find all the photos you have applied that keyword to; the search would only return results for the current folder.
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Chris, The only real benefit of cataloging in ON1 is to able to search all folders in that catalog at once.
For example I have a main folder called "Photos" under that I have folders by Year Month and Day
Lets say I happen to be in folder Photos\2019\May\01 and I want to search for photos with the keyword "Birds"
If I put Birds in the search field and I did not have a catalog only the current folder Photos\2019\May\01 would be searched
However if my main "Photos" folder was cataloged all under Photos would be searched.
So the advantage of a cataloged folder structure simply allows for fast search of all folders in that catalog at once. Otherwise I would have to select each individual YY\MM\DD folder to search for "Birds" . Would take forever that way for me.
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Like already mentioned Chris Hesketh, the only benefit of a catalog is the ability to search and organise across all images. As a side benefit, all previews for the catalog are permanent and therefore the browsing is fast and smooth.
There are other major benefits that are not applicable to ON1 so far. For example, the ability to backup/copy a catalog across systems. In case of LR, I can simply copy the current catalog and it has all the edits and information for all my images. I can open the same catalog on any other system and, if needed, change the base path for the images and use it as it was on the original system. In fact, in LR, I can also copy the previews across to another system as well.
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Thank you all for your detailed responses regarding cataloging and using multiple computers. You have all been very helpful, I appreciate the time you have taken to respond.
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