Use photolibrary from a NAS

[Othun1]

I’m a Home user that wants to have my photolibrary in a shared folder to access remotely from my mac computers and free the memory of all.

I saw ASUSTOR NAS has a functionality to have a hdd that can be formated in HFS+ with a functionality to access with their MIARCHIVE program.

My question is if it will work to have the photolibrary on the NAS and can be accessed from the macbook and will work ( see, edit, face recognition ,…)

Maybe are there other configurations to achieve these needs?

Thank you!

 

[Bigwaff]

Mount the network attached storage on your Mac which has the Photo Library you want to “share”. Then copy the Photo Library. See -

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

To save storage space on your Mac, you can move your Photos library to a different storage device.

support.apple.com

Mount the network attached storage on the other Macs and on each double-click on the “shared” Photo Library.

 

[RhetTbull]

I would **not** do this if your plan is to have multiple Macs using the same library. You'll definitely got conflicts with different computers writing to the same database -- Photos was not designed for this use case. You could have a separate library for each Mac on the NAS but I would not try to use the same library.

Are you using iCloud? If so you could turn on `Optimize Mac Storage` in `Photos > Settings > iCloud` to free up space -- this causes Photos to download only a preview of each image until you need to edit or export an image at which time the original is downloaded. Even if doing this it is good for at least one Mac to download everything for backup/archive purposes (I don't trust iCloud). That one Mac could store the "download originals" version of the library on the NAS and all the others could use "Optimize Mac Storage".

If you aren't using iCloud, are you using a referenced library? (do you have `Photos > Settings > General > Copy Items to this Mac` checked or not?) A referenced library is one where the files are not copied to the Photos library and are stored elsewhere. If that's the case the space is being taken up by the referenced files, not the Photos library itself. If you moved the reference files to the NAS, each Mac could have a Photos library that's looking to the NAS for originals. Referenced files do not sync to iCloud though and the fact that you mentioned multiple Macs has me suspecting you are using iCloud.

 

[Bigwaff]

I would **not** do this if your plan is to have multiple Macs using the same library.

Your advice is good advice if OP means to make the NAS shared library the system library for each Mac. Photos can open multiple libraries (one at a time) but only one can be set as the system library which syncs with iCloud. Each Mac has to be using same version of Photos, otherwise Macs with older Photos version won’t be able to open library. I read the question from OP to be how to have multiple Macs open the same photo library. OP didn’t mention iCloud at all.

 

[Othun1]

I would **not** do this if your plan is to have multiple Macs using the same library. You'll definitely got conflicts with different computers writing to the same database -- Photos was not designed for this use case. You could have a separate library for each Mac on the NAS but I would not try to use the same library.

Are you using iCloud? If so you could turn on `Optimize Mac Storage` in `Photos > Settings > iCloud` to free up space -- this causes Photos to download only a preview of each image until you need to edit or export an image at which time the original is downloaded. Even if doing this it is good for at least one Mac to download everything for backup/archive purposes (I don't trust iCloud). That one Mac could store the "download originals" version of the library on the NAS and all the others could use "Optimize Mac Storage".

If you aren't using iCloud, are you using a referenced library? (do you have `Photos > Settings > General > Copy Items to this Mac` checked or not?) A referenced library is one where the files are not copied to the Photos library and are stored elsewhere. If that's the case the space is being taken up by the referenced files, not the Photos library itself. If you moved the reference files to the NAS, each Mac could have a Photos library that's looking to the NAS for originals. Referenced files do not sync to iCloud though and the fact that you mentioned multiple Macs has me suspecting you are using iCloud.

Thank you!
At the end I decide to have a QNAP TS264 and I will use their app QMAGIE to see the photos from the mobiles and from the Computers.
I don’t use icloud and I saw that If I use the referenced photos, my editions on the photolibrary don’t go to the original and only ser the results in the photolibrary. Is not what I want.
Regards!