Leave it to Adobe to create a nonsensical restriction that they probably had to add extra code to implement.
It isn‘t just Adobe . It is grounded in SQLite . user Johnrellis Response on this thread .
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Twelve years later, and the landscape has changed considerably -- Windows SMB implementations are much more mature and Samba has become the standard non-Microsoft implementation of the SMB protocol. LR has switched to using the write-ahead-logging mode (WAL) of SQLite, which has different issues with network files. I'm not aware of anyone who has done recent tests with network-stored LR catalogs or written authoritatively about SQLite and newer file-server implementations.
Adobe has shown no inclination to re-examine the issue. Last year they changed LR to use the higher-performance write-ahead logging mode of SQLite and broke the longstanding ability to import from catalogs stored on network servers.
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Is there any reason why I can't work on a Lightroom catalog from a network (NAS) drive? My partner and I have a desktop PC and a laptop, both of which share the same Creative Cloud licence, but any Lightroom storage is restricted to either one local drive or the other. We also have a network...
community.adobe.com
The catch-22 is that there are at least as many folks grumbling about slow catalogs as newtwork located ones . SQLite doesn’t have a high priority for network ( versus direct attached or SAN attached ) files.
There are plenty of other apps with SQLite stores embedded open that will probably act quirky or get corrupted on network stores . LR is a more ‘juicey’ target because the catalogs pragmatically get relatively large and more folks want to use without moving the file .