Because I have a very similar setup (powerful desktop for >80% my editing) and a laptop I started to test the following setup (using DT 3.2.1 on Ubuntu):
- Created symlinks from my local picture folders (e.g. in
/media/$USER/some_drive/images) to$HOME/Pictureson both PC & laptop - Put
library.dbanddarktablercon my Nextcloud instance for sync, this has the nice property that those files are backed up in my regular Nextcloud backup and there are even several versions backed up - Created symlinks from the local Nextcloud copies of
darktablercandlibrary.dbinto their original destination in$HOME/.config/darktable
This has been working well, because image paths are the same on my PC & laptop, hence database entries work on both machines and I immediately see if files are not (yet) copied on my laptop, when their folder appears striken through in the lighttable folder view.
As I never run DT on my desktop & laptop in parallel this should not lead to concurrent changes to the library.
However, I frequently get a warning that the image metadata between sidecar files and database differ by their date, but those warnings can be dealt with quite easily.
Let’s see how well the sync goes once library.db is getting bigger, right now it only is ~16MB in size.
Syncing the SQLite library.db had me think as well on a decentralized SQL database, running on a NAS / server instance as an alternative to the file based SQLite db.