Big Sur Does Not Support Photos Library On NAS

If you want to store your photos and videos on NAS but also enjoy the editing and other features that Photos offers, here's one possibility:

1) Export everything from the Photos library into a folders and sub-folders structure (years/months), and save on NAS (Photos' native export function will put everything in one big folder. If you want to retain organization, Photos Takeout app does it.)

2) When the export is complete (May take a while), delete the photos and videos from Photos (Probably better to create a new library, and backup the current one somewhere before deleting it).

3) Go to Photos Preferences, General, and uncheck "Copy items into the Photos Library".

4) Import the items on NAS back into Photos as referenced files.

This would solve the storage issue and give you scalability, but a few things to bear in mind:

1) You'll need to ensure proper setup between your Mac and the NAS

2) You'll need to remake the albums. You could extract a list of albums and file names of the photos in each

3) You'll need to leave special file types e.g. live photos and bursts behind in Photos - they can't be exported

4) You should be aware of the disadvantages of referenced files and work around them

Hi,

Perhaps you could use the free Adobe Bridge as photo catalogue app and store your photos in files on your NAS.

Just a thought.

I have my photos library on a Qnap Nas in an apfs disk image and connected via Thunderbolt, once mounted everything seems to work fine.

Big Sur seems however to have broken my iCloud music / iTunes Match setup (which is also on the NAS but not in an image).

once mounted everything seems to work fine.

The problem is that the library will be damaged silently in the background and you may not be noticing it for a long time. You will simply get more and more inconsistent entries in the internal database files. You may occasionally see recovered files appearing after a library repair, and one day, out of the blue, the repair will fail altogether. Make regular complete backups of the library and keep the older backups as well, as you cannot test, if the library is still consistent and healthy.

Your worst case option is to extract the renamed originals from the library , then give them meaningfull names with somthing like exiftools.

Besides Photo Supreme, what are these photo apps you speak of. I may be interested.

Canto Cumulus: https://www.canto.com

Extensis Portfolio: https://www.extensis.com/portfolio

Cumulus asks that you call for pricing and Extensis is quoted at $300/per user/per year

Isn't the benefits of buying Apple because of their "ecosystem". Isn't the photos app part of the "ecosystem". Haven't I already paid for the "ecosystem". Doesn't apple want a good "ecosystem"?

Yes but you're confusing ecosystem with only apps made by Apple. If you stick to only Apple apps your computing experience will be fairly basic. The ecosystem is broader and more sophisticated than that. Apple give away a lot of free apps and they all have the same thing in common: they're 'good-enough-for-most-things'. So, Pages is pretty good if you're making a newsletter or writing letters. Want to layout a doctoral thesis? Not so much. Then what do you do? You go into the 3rd party market and buy more powerful apps, like Word, Mellel or Nisus Writer. Ditto with Numbers and apps like Excel. Same with iMovie and Photos. (Though in the case of iMovie Apple also sells a pro level app.) That's the ecosystem: a space where Apple give away free mid range apps to their users, but also leave space in the ecosystem for 3rd party developers to create and sell. That's a good ecosystem, a world of Apple and 3rd party developers offering power and choice to users.

When I got my Mac I was willing to buy Aperture. Apple killed it off.

Hardly relevant here in that Aperture didn't support the library on a network share either. But look at the ecosystem now around Photos - and this is not even including apps that work as extensions to Photos - you have Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Lightroom Classic, CaptureOne, Exposure X6, OnOne PhotoRaw, DxO PhotoLab, PhotoSupreme. That's 7 apps off the top of my head from 6 different developers. They have different capabilities and work at different price points. That's a healthy ecosystem. That's actually more diverse than the ecosystem around word processors! And each of those apps is a photo manager, we've not even got close to editors there.

And - with the exception of Photo Supreme, created and maintained by one guy, and the cloud version of Lightroom which has the library in the Cloud, and so is not germane to this discussion - what do those apps have in common? None of them support the library on an NAS either. What they might do is support storing masters on the NAS and having the library on your internal disk. (This is theoretically possible with Photos but I would not go there in a month of Sundays - an absolute recipe for disaster.)

When photos was working on my hard drive connected to AirPort Extreme I used to open the app up quite often and look at photos or go get one when I needed. I can tell after using Mac without this ability I will use photos barely ever, only to save new photos and never view again.

I'm not sure I understand your point here. You'll collect new photographs but never look at them? Huh? Why bother collecting them then?

And this:

Also, TV and Music libraries are still on network.

Don't you see the enormous difference between these libraries and the Photos one? The TV and Music libraries are about as complex as an address book. You don't edit files with either of them. Photos, on the other hand, does the same things as these apps do (create albums/playlists/edit metadata) but also manages a non-destructive editing process built around a parametric editor, along with the integration with many other apps and extensions. It really is a far more complex beast.

The problem is that the nas drive does not support the filesystem features the library needs to operate correctly. It will appear to work for some time, but will gradually build up damage and start to fail. You are seeing the result of that with the curation. In the end the damage can become so great that it will refuse to open at all and may well be beyond repair.

Even worse - if you are taking backups, even old backups will be damaged due to this gradual build up of errors.

Every couple of weeks or so we get somone who can no longer access there photos. More often than not it is because they have been storing them on an unsupported volume.

If you value your photographs, stop storing them on a NAS drive in a photos library.

Would it be possible to create a sparsebundle “folder” on your NAS and use this as the Photos Library repository?

If I currently have them in the app and want to move them, do I just export them all there?

File -> Export -> Export unmodified original

You can get images from your Phone and/or camera with Image Capture.

Oh I'm quite sure they can figure it out because, as I say there are apps that do it. Apart from Photo Supreme (who do strongly warn that performance may be affected if you do) there are a couple of apps that do this routinely. They start about the $500 per seat price range. The old line applies: you get what you pay for. So if you really want this feature, how much are you willing to pay?

Due to the number of photos I have - around 90,000, I have for a number of years maintained 2 photo libraries. My system library has the last 2 full years plus the current year and this is also on iCloud. The second library which was on an external drive has all photos - around 83,000 - up to the end of the last year. At the end of each year I export the last completed year's photos from the system library and import to the library on the external drive - so my external library has all photos for all completed years. Some 12 months ago I purchased a Synology DS218 NAS with 2 6gb drives and copied the library on the external drive to a directory on the NAS. This was with Catalina and the NAS library worked fine. I am now on Big Sur and have been since it came out and Photos still works fine. The only issue I have is that the process of curating photos on the NAS seems to be stuck, but I am not too worried about that.

Have you read the thread? Again:

The problem is that the library will be damaged silently in the background and you may not be noticing it for a long time. You will simply get more and more inconsistent entries in the internal database files. You may occasionally see recovered files appearing after a library repair, and one day, out of the blue, the repair will fail altogether

That could work as Bridge is effectively a souped-up file browser with no central database.

The problem I have is with my external hard drives .Both drives updated to the new big sur photos on my 5K imac but now not backwards compatible with Catalina photos Which means I cannot plug my external drives into my older iMac which is a 2013 model and not updateable to big Sur.