How to move iPhoto library to NAS

Hello Elbows,

I am in the process of transferring my iPhoto (9) library (255 GB) over to a My Book Live Duo 6 TB (ext4) external HDD. I have already successfully ran Time Machine on my local HDD (a day long process as it was 475 GB on my local HDD). The MBLD is on a RAID 1 so that it mirrors betweeen two HDD.

My iMac (OX 10.6.8) is pretty old but I am grateful to have organized my 25K photos on it. It is wired to my Airport Extreme Base and the MBLD is also wired to that same AE (CAT 6 using Gigabit Ethernet).

Hopefully I have the same experience as you do, but I will let you all know. It has taken 11 hours to do 27 GB out of the 255 GB and it says it has 90 hours to go!

I wonder if it has anything to do with how the ext4 writes the data.

Hi there,

you seem to be talking about a DAS and not a NAS. iPhoto Library should have no problem in those conditions.

Regards,

Hi mar.garcia,

I am unaware of the difference between DAS and NAS. I will try to do some research on it, but what is the difference? I will try to do some research on my own, but any help would be appreciated.

Update: After 18 hours, I have "About an hour" to go (242 GB out of 255 GB)! Thank God the status changed from 90 hours to what it is now.

I will see if the iPhoto transfer worked.

NAS is a network storage server whereas DAS is a storage device attached directly to your computer. Current NAS devices do not feature native HFS+ support (Apple native File System), and that becomes a challenge and a risk should you decide to store irreplaceable files on it (like iPhoto Library for instance) for if something may happen, Apple support would easily look the other way.

Regards,

Hi towers00 -

I just came across your post and I too am trying to move my iPhoto library to a MyBookLive (not the Duo though, 3TB only). I noticed that you said you ran a Time Machine backup first and are now trying to move your photos over. Is that the way you're supposed to do this...Time Machine backup then move other files later? I'm confused about Time Machine vs. moving files to free up space on my MacBook Pro and the correct way to go about this. Thanks

Hello alit25,

First thing first....you may already know this but it would be advisable and best if you made a backup of your iPhoto library. Not only because everyone says to do so, but there is great wisdom behind it. I was running out of space on my iMac. To free up space was my main concern at one point, but then it became my #2 concern as I realized how precious my 25K photos were. That is why I ran TM first.

Even though I was able to successfully backup my iPhoto library unto MBLD and I was able to move my entire iPhoto library (272 GB) over to MBLD, it took about 8 minutes to open up my photo library. Later I found out that:

"There is no support built into the MBL Duo for iPhotos..."

See post here:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live-Duo/Transferring-iPhoto-Library-to-MBLD /m-p/420060#M1255

My current setup is the following as I explained on the WD Community board:

This is how I have resolved my issue with MBLD and my iPhoto Library:

After all the time and energy into the matter, I now have an 500 GB external WD Passport Elite HDD where I put both my 272 GB iPhoto Library and 190 GB iTunes Library on (connection via USB2). I then use my MBLD as strictly a backup drive (connection via local area network - CAT6). It is a very expensive 6TB backup system that I have setup as RAID 1 (therefore only 3 TB), but it functions well.

Time Machine will keep on making backups of the changes and eventually running my space down on the MBLD, but I am at ease with having a backup of my libraries. In that sense, it was worth the trouble, time, and energy to finally set it up this way.

Perhaps the only other thing I would change would be to get a "faster" external HDD. The connection via USB works fine. Sometimes iPhoto works sluggish on some big edits of photos and scrolling the 400 + events, but it works. You also have to take into consideration that I have an older iMac (OSX 10.6.8 - 2 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM).

But I am happy to report that I have space now on my local HDD and that was my initial problem. I am sorry to hear about the problems others have and I do understand the frustation, time, and over-all energy into solving or attempting to solve issues can be. Thanks Tony for the heads up on iPhoto. Would have loved to have known that before but trial and error and live and learn.

I hope this helps.

Everything you said was perfect till you came to this point , "

towers00 wrote:

After all the time and energy into the matter, I now have an 500 GB external WD Passport Elite HDD where I put both my 272 GB iPhoto Library and 190 GB iTunes Library on (connection via USB2). I then use my MBLD as strictly a backup drive (connection via local area network - CAT6). It is a very expensive 6TB backup system that I have setup as RAID 1 (therefore only 3 TB), but it functions well.

it turned like a pro very pro user explaining things in his way ..

Back to your simplicity man

please explain this point i have the problem backing up my iPhoto libraries and its really take long time i have now 500+ GB and i started to die .. help

Actually it was no problem to copy the entire iPhoto or Aperture library to e.g. a Synology NAS 1513+ into the NAS photo library and redirect to this new address with several easy clicks in iPhoto>Edit or with Alt key before startup. It is even more easy (but still a little expensive) to create your own cloud system, by buying two exactly the same Synology NAS and place one into another House, Office, Town or whatever - and mirror this two. You can access them from your Mac or iPad or even iPhone from wherever in the World you like. You have always a automatic Backup somewhere else and fire, crime or failure on one Hard drive do not destroy your complete movie, photo and music library and all the other important data. And you do not store your data in a cloud where all kind of folks with paranoia from foreign governments get access by changing law. I feel more save then with one or several extern HDD and backup at the same place...

What I experience, is a real challenge to me and therefore my question to all of you is: how do I extract all the photo's from iPhoto library, to store them into my Synology 'Photo folder' for access of DS Photo on iPad. I really like to transfer all 30k+ photos and own film-snippets from education, out of our huge iPhoto library and show this pictures and own movies with iPad and projector. It is IMO much more user-friendly to share some pictures in some folders with other students or family or others images with friends with Synology NAS. I use Dropbox until now, but with our own cloud, we can do everything at our own. I do not like to share my entire iPhoto library with everybody. Folders with names related to time and place are easy to make new catalogs on Synology - DS Photo on my iPad.

A easy way is, to highlight all photos in iPhoto and copy them directly to our NAS. This only gives a copy of the thumbnails in iPhoto - not always the original size.

I can’t definitely not copy the movies or films this way. There I need to find the original in the library first - in one of thousands of iPhoto library folders. Looking inside the content, it is a mess with folders with long timestamps and folders inside folders inside other folders.

Perhaps anybody know a better and more easy way to extract the original .jpg or .mov files out of the library into our NAS? Perhaps combine both or other ideas?

Thank you in advance!

And happy new year everybody!

extract all the photo's from iPhoto library,

Select them and export (file menu ==> export) - see the user tip on exporting for details of the options available and for more info on photo and file management using iPhoto

And note that you probably will have problems in the future - an NAS is not an appropriate place for the iPhoto library as it is not the correct format (Mac OS extended (journaled) )

LN

Hi there Gerrith,

Gerrith wrote:

What I experience, is a real challenge to me and therefore my question to all of you is: how do I extract all the photo's from iPhoto library, to store them into my Synology 'Photo folder' for access of DS Photo on iPad. I really like to transfer all 30k+ photos and own film-snippets from education, out of our huge iPhoto library and show this pictures and own movies with iPad and projector. It is IMO much more user-friendly to share some pictures in some folders with other students or family or others images with friends with Synology NAS. I use Dropbox until now, but with our own cloud, we can do everything at our own. I do not like to share my entire iPhoto library with everybody. Folders with names related to time and place are easy to make new catalogs on Synology - DS Photo on my iPad.

A easy way is, to highlight all photos in iPhoto and copy them directly to our NAS. This only gives a copy of the thumbnails in iPhoto - not always the original size.

I can’t definitely not copy the movies or films this way. There I need to find the original in the library first - in one of thousands of iPhoto library folders. Looking inside the content, it is a mess with folders with long timestamps and folders inside folders inside other folders.

Perhaps anybody know a better and more easy way to extract the original .jpg or .mov files out of the library into our NAS? Perhaps combine both or other ideas?

Thank you in advance!

And happy new year everybody!

I'm glad you asked this because reaching that very thing has been on my list since a few weeks already, but I have never got around to starting looking for information in the internet. Therefore I would also love to hear what other say about this, and, of course, I ask you to report back if you ever find an elegant solutions for pulling information out of your iPhoto Library, and put it on your NAS.

I own a QNAP NAS, and there are also applications for mp3 playback, picture slideshow, etc., and for that I need to find a way to strip information out of the Library and put it on the NAS. With iTunes it is pretty easy, you just need to run an rsync job every now and then, and you will have all your artists effortlessly replicated on the NAS side. But for iPhoto content, things are trickier as the data within tha Library "stack" is organised in a Database fashion, thus making it very complicated to get yourself around the Database.

How do you plan to put the files on the NAS? I follow this structure "YEAR/MONTH/EVENT_x". It would be cool to not only be able to extract the pictures and videos from the Library but also be able to store the data propperly on the NAS.

Getting material out of iPhoto is simple, as there is one way to do it.

File -> Export

This User Tip

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4921

has details of the options in the Export dialogue.

If you intend to export the pictures and videos just once, that's indeed the easiest and quickest approach. In my case (and I think I speak for Gerrith too), I want to do that several times a year (if not once a month).

Exporting pictures contained in multiple events using your method will create a chunk of pictures with no order. That's not an option for me at least.

Nevertheless it's the only way to do it. There is no other supported way and any of the hacks will cost you either quality and/or metadata.

Marc, you can export all photos by clicking "Photos" in the sidebar, select all photos, export them in their original format, and then choose your preferred subfolder option, like event name. That will add organization to the pictures. You can then merge that export with your previous months export and it should only copy over new pictures and changes and not create a bunch of duplicates.

tcbritt3 wrote:

Marc, you can export all photos by clicking "Photos" in the sidebar, select all photos, export them in their original format, and then choose your preferred subfolder option, like event name. That will add organization to the pictures. You can then merge that export with your previous months export and it should only copy over new pictures and changes and not create a bunch of duplicates.

I'll give this a try. If it works, it could very well be the solution I'm after. Thanks man!! 🙂