Hey everyone!  Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving holiday and ate lots of Turkey!  I know I did.  This blog is about how I plan to manage my Lightroom catalog on my laptops for next year.  File management is an ongoing process for me, and I change it every so often.  This year I'll be adding a small travel laptop to the mix.  Currently, I have my iMac with a 27-inch monitor that I love.  I also have a 15-inch Macbook Pro that I have had for years and have upgraded the memory and hard drive on to an SSD, and I just love it!  But it's a little on the heavy side, and I want a small laptop or 2-inch computer to take with me when I travel. _DSC4702  Whether it's camping in my Teardrop trailer or on photo workshops with my photography club, the last couple of years I have kept a separate Lightroom catalog on my laptop and my all photos catalog on my iMac separate and merged them at the end of the year.  It's not too hard to do and seems to work out okay.  But if I add another computer to the mix, what then?  Do I work with three Lightroom catalogs?  And when I have my photos on a laptop catalog, it can be difficult to look at them on my iMac if I haven't transferred them to it.  So here is the solution that I plan to try this year.  I'm going to purchase an SSD external hard drive for faster operating speed.  I'm going to create a Lightroom catalog and put the catalog and everything on the SSD drive.  Then, no matter what computer I'm using, I can bring up the catalog on the SSD drive and edit my photos on the iMac, MacBook Pro, or my travel computer.  

_DSC4701 I haven't purchased my travel computer yet, but I have a few requirements that I'm looking for.  First, it should be small and portable with an 11 to 12 inch screen.  It has to have the ports so I can back up photos to an external drive.  I want it to have a Solid State Drive (SSD) for optimum speed and as much RAM that I can get at a low price (maybe 8gb).  And it must be cheap, in the $300-ish range.  That way if I break it, lose it, or if it's stolen, I'm not heart broken like I would be with my Macbook Pro.  I don't plan on storing anything on it, so the hard drive doesn't need to be large. 128gb will be fine.  I really don't plan on doing a lot of editing, but I want it to be capable of running Lightroom Classic so I can cull out bad photos and maybe edit one or two photos now and then.  Other than that, it will be a web browsing, email checking computer.  Now with the price range I just gave, you can figure out that my travel laptop will not be an Apple product.  I would love for it to be, but I want my travel computer to be cheap.  So it will be a Windows operating system, and I will have to format my drive so it will work with Windows and Mac products so I can pass the information between the two operating systems.  I currently use Adobe Creative Cloud for Photographers, which is a $10 per month subscription for both Lightroom and Photoshop.  You can only run two computers on the subscription at a time, so I'll have to sign out of one of my devices and sign onto my travel laptop for this to work.  From what I have read, this should be possible.  Adobe even gives you instructions on how to do so.