Logging in/out Photos?

[Longwerks]

I currently store all of my studio’s photos on a separate (but connected) server which I and my co-workers all have access to. Our studio produces around 50+ (50-80 page) publications a year using these server stored photos. The problem we have is an inability to track the photos and what publications they are used in due to the large amount of material we produce, thus we end up duplicating photos in rival publications since we shoot a lot of general unspecific stock (not good!). Does anyone know if this “Final” version of Lightbox, has an administrator setting that allows different users connected to a server to check in/out (upload/download) photos if they “log-in.” Or is there perhaps a way to add a “notation” to an image through Lightbox to designate whether or not an image was used (or how many times, or which publication, ect.) and if not Lightbox…any other software suggestions? Many thanks in advance.

[johnbeardy]

No it doesn't, and you'd be better off looking at Portfolio for this sort of work. It handles the multiuser requirements and is more geared to general asset management than LR. So it would be easy enough to expand it with fields for rights and usage details. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but you're going to need all sorts of special keywords and workarounds to do it in LR. Alternatively, if you have database admin people, you can hook up Lightroom's database via ODBC and connect it to Access or Filemaker databases which would contain the rights and usage info. But that would be a bit of a house of cards. Portfolio handles such tasks easily.

John

[Longwerks]

Thanks John,
Portfolio has been a program that we have been looking at for a while, I think in our case it may just be a good solution (other than having our programers write us a new software application). I guess the two main things we were really looking at in Lightroom were the editing functions and the handling of a large workflow of RAW files. We are currently a PC based operation using the CS2 suite, so my thinking for a consideration of including Lightroom was more along the lines of general compatibility.  

No it doesn't, and you'd be better off looking at Portfolio for this sort of work. It handles the multiuser requirements and is more geared to general asset management than LR. So it would be easy enough to expand it with fields for rights and usage details. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but you're going to need all sorts of special keywords and workarounds to do it in LR. Alternatively, if you have database admin people, you can hook up Lightroom's database via ODBC and connect it to Access or Filemaker databases which would contain the rights and usage info. But that would be a bit of a house of cards. Portfolio handles such tasks easily.

John
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[theophilus]

Keep in mind that there will be an SDK for Lightroom, perhaps your programmers could add the functionality into another module for you.