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WDI Author

Level 1

83 points

Big Sur Does Not Support Photos Library On NAS

Since Big Sur no longer supports Photo libraries on NAS, per Apple technical support, does anyone have any recommendations for a photo library software that does for a replacement for the "Photos" app on Mac?

Apples solution was to plug my hard drive in to my laptop which would work but much more inconvenient, downgrade, or use iCloud Photos library.

I guess I'll have to plug my hard drive directly in my computer as a downgrade.

I'm not really that keen on uploading every picture I take to the internet, AKA iCloud Photos, because...

It's totally unnecessary IMO.
Tons of wasted bandwidth for RAW etc especially since I'm not interested in them being anywhere else except home where they are safe with me. I'm limited to 5 Mb/s upload event though my download is 200 Mb/s. Just the way they do it around where I live.
etc

Did anybody else keep there photo library on a NAS and what do you do now?

Cloud services are great. I've been an iTunes Match subscriber since...? the dinosaurs? Just not interested in uploading my photos. I've weighed the benefits back and forth and I'm just not interested. Bottom line is that is seems like wasted bandwidth, overhead, and well, they are personal. Photos with NAS in Mojave worked for me. Just looking a new solution.

Posted on Nov 20, 2020 8:35 PM

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

197,315 points

Posted on Nov 21, 2020 1:26 AM

WDI wrote:

Oh, and there is no going back because Big Sur changed the library when troubleshooting the issue so it will no longer open in Mojave Photos app...

The only way to downgrade the library losslessly is using iCloud Photos. If you would just upload the photos once, to iCloud Photos Library, temporarily for the conversion, and then download again on Catalina to a new, empty library, you will have a perfect downgrade to the Photos 5 format. See: Downgrading a Photos Library to a Previous Version of Photos with the Help of iCloud Photos

But surely you have made a backup of your library before you upgraded to Big Sur? Restore the Photos 5 version from your backup to have a Catalina version.

Without a backup and without iCloud Photos you will have a hard time to get access to your Photos Library on Catalina, because we can no longer recover the photos unchanged from the Photo Library package. We need Photos to retrieve the photos from the library. The package contents is no longer easy to read without the help of Photos to decode the filenames: How Photos 5.0 on Catalina Manages original Files and Filenames

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Big Sur Does Not Support Photos Library On NAS

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