Lightroom 4 with Google Drive Part II

Right, so I've started testing my implementation before uploading the greater part of 100GB of photos. My plan was to see how Drive handles the syncing uploaded files to a second device, if I already copied these files over locally. Although it isn't really important for me at the moment, it will be important if I were to have a laptop and wanted the same catalogue working off of two computers.

First of all, I copied roughly 700mb of photos into the Google Drive folder on OS X and let it sync. I switched over to my Windows 8 partition and put the same folder into my user folder.

I then ran the Google Drive installer and selected the user folder that I had copied over, in the hope that Google Drive would immediately recognize it as fully synced.

Unfortunately, Google Drive would not install using  location that already had files in it, so I had to try a workaround.

I selected a different directory finished the installation, but quit the Drive application before it had a chance to start downloading files. The result was the Dive folder with no files, but with the right folder layout. I copied my other files over to this directory, and then started the sync application again.

For about two seconds I felt really happy s a green tic appeared over the 700MB folder I had copied over, but alas it was replaced by a refresh symbol and a second folder was created with y photos being downloaded.

The repercussions of this experiment for me aren't a big deal, as I don't have a second computer at the moment. If I did want to keep two computers completely in sync though it would involve the second one having to download a massive amount of data, for me about 20% of my monthly limit.

I've read that Dropbox doesn't have this issue that you can copy files locally and it will recognize them, but I haven't tested it yet. I can only imagine that it's also a feature Drive will get eventually. But for anyone oping to this kind of thing right now, an alternative provider might be best if bandwidth is an issue for you.


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