Q: iPhoto with NAS
Hi, I have had this dilemma for about 3 years or so and it drives me crazy, I need a genius!
I read the following article with great interest by Terence Devlin:
He makes some very good points about the benefits of a managed library, which I can't disagree on, such as importing photos and not having to worry about files breaking the link to the library.
However, I just struggle to adopt the managed library approach. Don't get me wrong, I would love to use iPhoto, I particularly like the integration to Facebook. I quote:
"
Some of the reasons people offer for running a Referenced Library include the following:
I have too many photos to fit on my disk.
You can run a Managed Library from any locally connected USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt disk (note: not a NAS) that is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a wired connection.
"
To set the scene, I have 338GB of photos currently, with 10TB potential maximum and I am using a NAS.
1. I suppose I could get an external hard drive to store the entire library, but in reality, I didn't buy a MacBook Pro so I could lug around a hard drive to view my photos.
2. So why not use the "Copy Files to the iPhoto Library Folder..." option? Well, Ideally this is what I want to do, but I do want to automatically add new files when the operating system detects them, or by a script. I want photos to respect the existing folder structure and preset this inside photos. I want photos to remove photos that are no longer there.
3. If I used a manage library, I cannot have "one version of the truth". Currently my NAS makes available my photos on the internet as it has it's own web server. This is quite cost saving on online photo providers.
4. A managed library ties you down to MacOS. I have had my MBP for 3 years now and i'm starting to get fed up with limited third party applications and having to run windows for non supported applications. Though, I still appreciate the brand and anticipate the next iphone / apple watch.
5. So why not just browse to the CIFS / AFP share and browse the photos from there? For some reason, regardless of the protocol, it takes ages for Mac to enumerate through the network drive to display photos. Windows running in Fusion, browses the CIFS share no problem.
6. Why not use another photo viewer? I have tried numerous amounts of viewers, quite a lot of them on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_image_viewersall with different performance or functionality limitations (such as uploading to facebook) but this still takes up countless hours searching for alternatives and having difficulties uninstalling them (because Mac's don't have a proper uninstaller and files are left behind)
I have also considered / considering the likes of Cloud Storage. (apple / Google);
I loved Picasa for Mac. It used to be able to handle much of this functionality for me, but they never did get round to supporting retina displays and have discontinued development to focus on their online photo service. Google's new service is suitable if they maintained folder names as album names, but no - they put everything into one big stream and don't natively support facebook - never saw that coming ay! I think Apple Photos is good if you live in the "bubble".
So I was hoping someone could put me in the right direction and make some workflow /application suggestions. I Ideally like a script to maintain my apple photo library, updating it based on the folder structure in my NAS.
I appreciate your time to understand my situation
Tom
Posted on Jul 20, 2016 12:31 PM


