Thanks Terence. After much research on this topic I have seen your name come up many times. I now understand the requirement that Photos can only work with a directly attached external hard drive formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Once I understood that, this is how I managed the workflow for offloading images from the Photos library on my laptop (after ten years of digital photography it is almost full) to my NAS. I was surprised at how unintuitive the process was considering how many of us have huge amounts of images!
Here is what I did, and a word of caution before I begin, I am not an expert at this and appreciate any comments on how to improve the workflow. So far, things have been working well for me.
My setup:
Macbook Pro mid-2009
OS X Yosemite 10.10.4
Apple Photos 1.0.1
Synology DS415+
- Before beginning, BACK UP ALL IMAGES to an external hard drive and disconnect it just to be safe!
- In Photos, under Preferences/General, check "Metadata: Include location information for published item"
- In Photos, select the images you want to offload to your NAS
- Go to File --> Export --> Export Unmodified Original...
- In the dialog box, make sure to select Subfolder Format: Moment Name
- Navigate to the "Photo" folder on your NAS and hit export
- I created a subfolder for each year in the NAS "Photo" folder and exported one year at a time from Photos
This is working well using Adobe Lightroom as the viewer/manager of the images. All data seems to be there (including GPS coordinates).