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Photos on NAS (Synology)

My 45000 photos use 1.6Tb, too much for a macbook. So I store them on my Synology NAS. With iPhotos, this worked just fine, but with the new Photos, I can no longer import from an SD card into the library from within the application. If I drag and drop from the finder, all is fine.


I have this wonderful 40TB NAS and simply don't want to purchase anything else, so why can't I use Photos with a NAS?


I've tried copying the entire Photos Library folder to an external disk, repaired it, then copied it back - no change.

I create a new Photos Library on the macbook, then copied to the NAS, same thing.


Is this an Apple File Protocoll problem? Should I use SMB or CIFS instead of AFP to export from the NAS?


MacBook Pro

Posted on Mar 5, 2020 12:46 PM

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Posted on Mar 5, 2020 3:08 PM

Is this an Apple File Protocoll problem? Should I use SMB or CIFS instead of AFP to export from the NAS?


None of the above. You're trying to run a Mac Database from a Linux computer. This causes two problems: The Photos database has to be on a disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or apfs. Running it on other disk formats risks database corruption. This was equally true of iPhoto, but it seems you were lucky. Now you're luck has changed. It won't change back. Second: Photos (like iPhoto) is not designed for a Network location. You risk poor performance and dataloss. The only solution to your problem is to move the library to an appropriately formatted disk directly attached to your Mac.




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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 5, 2020 3:08 PM in response to rmfbasel

Is this an Apple File Protocoll problem? Should I use SMB or CIFS instead of AFP to export from the NAS?


None of the above. You're trying to run a Mac Database from a Linux computer. This causes two problems: The Photos database has to be on a disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or apfs. Running it on other disk formats risks database corruption. This was equally true of iPhoto, but it seems you were lucky. Now you're luck has changed. It won't change back. Second: Photos (like iPhoto) is not designed for a Network location. You risk poor performance and dataloss. The only solution to your problem is to move the library to an appropriately formatted disk directly attached to your Mac.




Mar 5, 2020 12:58 PM in response to rmfbasel

We also have a Synology NAS. It runs on a version of Linux, and isn't restricted to SMB as APFS formatted drives are. We only use AFP on the NAS and have no issue with it.


But then, we also don't, and won't use Photos. Having your images on the NAS tied to Photos is a much different situation than ours where all of the images are just individual files not connected to, or embedded in anything.

Photos on NAS (Synology)

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