NAS storage for Lightroom?

Hi all,

Couple of questions. If you know one or more or have advice on the matter please, I'd love to hear it.

1. 2020 technology (because these things seem to change quite often) NAS hardware... Who or what do you use?

2. What do you do for keeping your photos and/or other things on the NAS so they can work with Lightroom

My current plan, as it stands, is to use one of the better known NAS vendors that support expandable drive bays and use Smart Previews so we can worn on photos from different computers. I saw a lot of ideas floating around on how to manage a catalog between two or more computers , but was not confident on the solutions themselves.

~CD

Keep in mind that most NAS manufactureres use a number of different brands of harddrives, none of them made by the NAS manufacturer.
A few harddrive manufacturers make NAS enclosures for their own harddrives, as a means of selling their own harddrives.

I prefer NAS which have RAID support built in, so two harddrives in the NAS enclosure can mirror each other so there are always two copies of data, when RAID 1 is the configuration of the NAS...if one drive has problems, the RAID NAS will warn you, so you can replace the problem harddrive and the RAID NAS than automatically rebuilds the second copy of data onto the replacement harddrive.

I have a Synology with two 12tb drives that I've yet to set up.

Canon-dude wrote in post #19060514
1. 2020 technology (because these things seem to change quite often) NAS hardware... Who or what do you use?

synology

Nothing. I just put them on there and access them via Lightroom.

Smart Previews are unnecessary for use with a NAS you are connected to. SPs are for when you are travelling/disconnecte​d. Files on a NAS are no different than those on an external drive or a local drive - though I would go with a cable connection rather than wifi.

The problem is going to be the multiple computers. LR is not designed to be a multi-machine/network app. The catalog isn't suitable and so all the solutions are work arounds... some of which carry the risk of catalog corruption. You can legally install LR on more than one machine... you just can't easily share one catalog over a network.

I hear what you're saying, but it sounds that would just be using LR with an external drive with a slower communication bus.

We'll see. The catalogs would have to be different on the 2+ computers, so all we can do is what XMP can contain. So at least we can see the changes, and then go from there. The smart previews seem to make sense because then there is no real time sync required from an ultra fast bus (SSD via NVMe) to network and/or USB. So edit via SP and then sync to NAS after all done for that sesson via XMP. Outside of this I feel like it becomes a chore to maintain.

If there's a better solution than above, would love to hear it.

The given requirement is that the photos need to be worked on from 2 computers sometimes within minutes of each other. That's a hard requiment unfortunately.

~CD

Canon-dude wrote in post #19060514
Hi all,

Couple of questions. If you know one or more or have advice on the matter please, I'd love to hear it.

1. 2020 technology (because these things seem to change quite often) NAS hardware... Who or what do you use?

2. What do you do for keeping your photos and/or other things on the NAS so they can work with Lightroom

My current plan, as it stands, is to use one of the better known NAS vendors that support expandable drive bays and use Smart Previews so we can worn on photos from different computers. I saw a lot of ideas floating around on how to manage a catalog between two or more computers , but was not confident on the solutions themselves.

~CD

As Dan Marchant already replied, you don't have to do anything at all, for NAS to work with LR. As for speed concerns, keep in mind that your RAW files can all be on NAS for achiving, while you keep the 'active year' photos on your internal HD or SSD for maximized performance.
I do that...all my 2019 photos (both RAW and derived JPG) were all moved from C: internal HD to Y: RAID NAS using very easy file management inherent to LR., in January 2020. Meanwhile the LR Catalog stays on internal HD/SSD, while the Catalog Backups are automatically filed on NAS by LR, as I set up in Preferences. And a second copy of the current year RAW files. for data redundancy, are simply copied onto a USB harddrive that supplements the internal HD, until they are moved from C: to the Y: RAID NAS.

It sounds like you have unique requirements if you're saying there will be at least two computers editing Lightroom catalogues. Is this for some commercial firm (where these computers are different licenses/people)? I think setting up the external NAS is the easy part: it is pretty straight forward to set the connection of a network drive of storage of all your RAW photos. What I would do is setup your folder system on the NAS for RAWs and designate another folder for exports from Lightroom. (you may also want a folder that's just read only for backup of original photos).

You could have the Lightroom catalogues on another folder on your NAS that you've also set on the different computer's preferences. As Dan indicated, though, I think you may still run into issues (Lightroom has a history for one account, but that might not carry through with different licenses sharing)....or what happens if someone makes an edit that you want to revert? For that reason, I would put the catalogues in a version-control system. Git is one such system I use for development. You setup a main repository on Github, and then each person that you invite can clone the repository to a folder on their computer. Once they are done making edits to the files on their computer, they push those edits back to the repository. In the repository, you can see a log of who has pushed edits, and you can roll back at anytime. Github is what I'm used to since it's popular with developers. There's probably other approaches, and I'm not familiar of one that's popular with image editing specifically. I have worked in office environments where internal networks were setup with Apache Subversion (software for using version control for networked folders).

Canon-dude wrote in post #19060924
The given requirement is that the photos need to be worked on from 2 computers sometimes within minutes of each other. That's a hard requiment unfortunately.

~CD

I'm not 100% clear on your workflow, but from the above quoted text the following may work.

My NAS runs Unraid which is similar to the OS vendors like Synology and QNAP use, but with a lot more flexibility, particularly when expanding the array. It will allow you to share network storage like any NAS and it also has the ability to run Dockers and VM's. You could run a Windows VM on the NAS and then each workstation could RDP into the VM that is running LR. You could even RDP into the VM from offsite. Unraid allows for passing the video card though to the VM as well.

I'm not sure about things like color accuracy over RDP or latency issues, but I do know that a lot of folks have a dedicated Unraid gaming VM and it works fine. I suppose one way to test this would be to just RDP from one of your workstations into your current computer running LR and see how it works/feels.

Well I think I might over explaining it, so sorry for the confusion. It's really kind of simple.

1. Have a studio. We've used seperate LR catalogs for years..shared photos via XMP and google driver, etc. if one of us had to work, or use photos from the other person
2. Want to move to a more seamless process. We have 4 cameras. At any given time one of use will use 1 of 2 active cameras to shoot and come back, so the memory cards contain all sorts of stuff when uploading -- this is just the way it is, it's easier for us this way.

3. When we go to upload, we both want access to the photos (enter NAS at this point).
4. We also want to be able to (once in a while) edit the same photos after it''s already been edited.
-- The kicker here is that because there has to be 2 catalogs, the metadata NOT carried through XMP can't be shared

I've been looking at some of the NAS solutions, and there looks like maybe some software for these NAS devices that allow synchronization. I would think you could take a catalog, put in on the NAS, and then load the NAS client software on each computer to synchronize the folder with the catalog and it's sub folders. This would seem to provide the functionality needs (if it works this way--need to read up on it more). The main issue wold be that the NAS keeps the copy and the clients synhronize to that copy via some background task, or on demand. I would hope the synchronization software is smart enough to only synchronize the changes. In this way there would not have to be a master.

The downside to that is the catalog could only be used by one person at a time.

Another ideas was to simply maintain two catalogs, independently. The actual photo management, we'd just have to live with, and it might not be that bad since we have our own way of keeping track of our workflows even though we share the output of our work.

Finally, we could have 3 catalogs:
1. Workstation 1 Photo Editing Catalog (stays on Workstation 1) - Uses the images from the NAS and writs out changes to XMP
2. Workstation 2 Photo Editing Catalog (stays on Workstation 2) - Uses the images from the NAS and writs out changes to XMP
3. Shared Photo Management Catalog - This is the catalog we use to tag, sort, label and export images from. This would run inside of a VM if we want to run along side the editing catalog -- again one person at a time)

So the above idea might work in that a) for the photo editing catalogs, it's just almost all "Develop" module usage, No real metadata management outside of snapshots stores on them and exported to the XMP. and b) shared management catalog where all of the labels, keywords, exporting settings, plugins for syncing to our online services, would reside)

Just an idea...crazy enough to work. We have 2 licenses, so we could effectively edit at the same time and then open the other catalog as needed. I THINK? lol!

CD

Just an FYI, the B&H Deal of the Day are the Western Digital Red/Red Pro NAS drives. See https://www.bhphotovid​eo.com/c/buy/Dealzone/​di/5903 for the details. Eight different options are listed.

I use Synology Nas and set it up to use Synology Hybrid Raid which gives very good array expansion ability and efficiency.

As for speed over the Lan cable that's going to depend on your current setup and how much your willing to invest. Several of the newer Nas units use 10Gbe ports.

I went for a 2bay NAS, which now think was a mistake go at least 4 bay would be my advice

Thanks,

I went with Synology 4 bay and I saw that deal last night, but the also had it on the Seagate ones. After reading the Seagate vs. WD Red, they seemed to be a bit faster (2 x 6TB). Will still have 2 bays available for future.

Will give an update on how it works out.

~CD

You might want to consider getting some WD Easystores, which are external drives and then removing the drives and putting those in your NAS. They are significantly cheaper (~ $130 for 8TB) and are very popular in theData Hoarding community as they are basically rebadged WD Red drives with less of a warranty. There are a number of videos on youtube showing you how to "shuck" or remove the drive from teh enclosure. I have shucked around 12 or so and it only takes a few minutes once you get the hang of it.

Which ever drive you go with try and confirm that they are CMR and not SMR drives if you are going to be setting up a RAID array. I believe for the WD's, you are safe at 8TB and above.

Bcaps wrote in post #19061654
You might want to consider getting some WD Easystores, which are external drives and then removing the drives and putting those in your NAS. They are significantly cheaper (~ $130 for 8TB) and are very popular in theData Hoarding community as they are basically rebadged WD Red drives with less of a warranty.

Risky, risky, risky!

In the "shucking" community you will find that indeed the Easystore drive often had a WD Red, or at least a drive bearing a red label inside. But most of what you find (comments, YouTube videos, etc.) is dated from 2017. Much of what you find today in the way of comments seem to indicate it no longer is a "Red" drive and WD may have gone to some lengths to prevent the bare drive being used out of its housing. If your drive power supply has a SATA power connector with all three voltages (5 wires on the connector), you need to remove the 3.3 v wire or use an IDE to SATA adapter, which has no 3.3 v wire. Although the discussion is for the 10TB Easystore, the nitty gritty of shucking the drive and finding out what is inside (most likely a WD White) can be found at https://www.servetheho​me.com …rnal-backup-drive-review/. The review points out that when comparing what they find inside against the WD Red there are a lot of similarities.

There are some reviews, comments, etc. that when you shuck the drive out of the Easystore enclosure that "less of a warranty" becomes no warranty.

For more pitfalls that may occur with the internals from Easystore drives on the shelf today, read https://forums.anandte​ch.com …king-hds-is-over.2497913/. It is possible you can end up with a drive that without some major work, may not operate at all.

I shucked two 10TB WD Whites.