Using Lightroom with images on a NAS with Windows and Mac?

"After some extensive reading on Lightroom Forums (thanks, RBerteig!) and some other sites I've found that sharing photos and Lightroom sessions is limited at best.

You can turn on the ""Automatically write changes into XMP"" feature for metadata. This will allow another computer to read in the image with the appropriate changes visible -- comments, lighting changes, crops, rotations, etc. (full list of XMP tags). However, the other computer will not have access to collections, filter pre-sets, and a whole host of other meta-features that Lightroom provides since these are stored in the catalog (an SQLite DB).

Some users have pointed out that one could copy the catalog back and forth (.lvcat and .lrdata) or sync it but this could easily be done in the wrong direction and mess everything up.

From my browsing of the Lightroom Forum's it sounds like having the ability to use LR on a NAS/network is really wanted and folks are encouraged to submit a request via Adobe's Feature Request/Bug Report Form.

Some Google searches that helped:

lightroom nas xmp
site:lightroomforums.net nas"

"I'm doing this right now and it works quite well if not very speedy...

Most of my pictures and my main catalogs are on external drives. If I make sure I have access to it before lauching Lightroom there's no problem.

I keep a small number of pictures and one catalog on the laptop to show/edit pictures on the go. On this computer I turned on the option to always ask which catalog to open at launch."