"I've got a laptop and take it on the road when shooting. If I use Album to organize the photos on my laptop, and then want to transfer them to my main PC, can I move the database? How about where the pictures are located? Is there a good way to manage organizing and moving pictures between a project shoot on the laptop and returning back to the studio for the PC?"

I had no real idea, so I asked Adobe for help on this. I got some great feedback from Adobe's product manager for Photoshop Album 2.0. Here's what I learned.

Adobe's answer to your question...
It sounds like you want to do catalog syching, which is a technique used by professional-level photographers. While many professional photographers do make use of Adobe Photoshop Album, this application is truly targeted at consumer level users who are looking to get the most out of their new digital cameras.

If you don't add/edit any metadata on your home computer (e.g., add tags, notes, captions) and you use the home computer as a backup copy of all the work you've done out in the field, you can use this workflow, though the caviate is that the work laptop and the home computer need to store the database and the assets in the same location. This means that if you store your photos in C:/Photos/ on your desktop, they'll also need to be in C:/Photos/ on your laptop.

So, here's the step by step:

The first time...

• From within Photoshop Album, go to File>Backup and backup the database and photos.
• Take that CD/DVD media to your home computer that should have Photoshop Album 2.0 installed and do a File>Restore.
• The application should restore the database and photos automatically to the path you had them on your laptop. Adobe Photoshop Album does not allow the user to choose new location for the database and photos.
• Do not do any database activities on the home computer because they'll get replaced by subsequent File>Restore functions.

Next time...

• Import photos onto your laptop and tag them, as you would normally do.
• Go to File>Backup and backup this database and photos and choose "incremental backup" on the laptop. This will backup only the information that differs since the last time you backed up.
• Go to your home computer and restore from the "incremental" media.
• This will wipe out any new information you have put into your home catalog between restores.

We want to thank Ryan and Asako from Adobe for helping us out with a great answer.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.