I'm trying to get into digital scrapbooking again. This has been a lot more difficult than it sounds. When I moved from from PC to Mac a year ago, I didn't really think about how I'd access my digital scrapbooking programs including ACDSee, the program that organizes all my digital scrapbooking supplies.

To my disappointment, I discovered ACDSee for Mac can't open an ACDSee for Windows catalog. This meant I'd either have to stay with the Windows version or retag all my png files again (not the jpgs because tags can be embedded in jpg files, just not png files. And note, png have transparency so I couldn't convert them to jpgs).

Of course, the snag to staying on Windows was that I wanted to use my Mac with Lightroom for photo editing and management, but to scrapbook I'd want both the photos and the supplies on the same computer.

Well my new solution isn't perfect but I'll document it for you in case you are struggling with the same thing. I have Lightroom set up on an EHD (note Lightroom can't access a networked catalog, it must be local), including the catalog, thumbnails and photos. On the same EHD is my folder of digital scrapbook supplies and my ACDSee catalog. The EHD is NTFS formatted and my mac is running a driver that allows it to read and write to the EHD.

My Workflow
I prepare the photos using Lightroom on my Mac but export the photos I think I'll need to jpg with all the edits onto the EHD. Then I unplug the EHD and plug it into the PC, open up Photoshop and ACDSee on the PC and pull all the supplies and photos into PS. Ideally I'd like to be able to use the Mac for the scrapbooking/PS piece but that would mean identifying the supplies in advance and copying them to a readily accessible location.

If you have any suggestions as to how I could improve my workflow I'd be interested in hearing them!

Here's the layout: