Hello to everyone. I am trying to find a great solution to my office/home system. We have like 5 computers here. Most are Macs but a couple are windows laptops. We use a lot of the Mac ecosystem meaning most of our photos are organized in Photos on a iMac. What we want to do is be able to load the Photos library on an external hard drive (NAS) device so we can connect to that Photos library from within our local network now matter what device we are on. This way we can connect our phone lets say to a Macbook Pro and then click on that NAS device and open the Photos library that is loaded on that NAS then look at the photos on the Photos library app. Then load pictures into it and modify or edit them and organize them. This way the one does not have to acutally go sit in front of the iMac where the photos library is currently at. If we want to sit somehwere else in the home we would have to pick up the iMac lol and carry it around. I know some of you may say why not just put the Photos library on the Macbook you want to use it on. First the Macbook Pro does not have the space that the iMac has to keep everything. Second this solution does not relaly help everyone to connect to that Photos library from their devices as well. With an external NAS device we can have a huge amount of expanded storage to add to all of our local computers.
The other matter in our research is that many of these NAS systems seem so complicated to use. We dont need most of the bells whistles that they come with. We like to see an open window that you can drag and drop folders or in this case the Photos library into the external hard drive and it copies to the external device. Also of note we are trying to see if doing this will allow us to open that Mac Photos library app on a windows laptop. Yes the app is designed to run on a Mac OS system. However if the application containing all of the photos inside it are instlaled on the NAS server or external hard drive, will that matter since your seemingly not running it on the windows computer? Meaning will one be able to run the library or open it on a windows computer since its actually physically on the NAS device and not on the windows coputer? Thanks for your advice and recommendations.
Moving the library to the NAS should be possible and just open the library from the workstation you are using if you need it. Other users will not have any problem as well using the library since the NAS will always be online.
You can open or mount your Photos library as well to your workstations that will directly be stored on the NAS, All Workstations that are on the local network should be able to access the NAS share folders including the library you moved to it.
Do you have any reccomendations of a NAS device I can move my Photos application to? I am able to copy the entire library to an external drive that is attached to my iMac and open the library. Obvoiusly I can do this because the iMac is what is bieng used to open the library. However the library with all the contents of the photos inside that library are on an external drive inside a regular enclosure. Its just not a NAS enclousure and I am hopeing to somehow do this over a NAS device. Even if I can use the library that is on the NAS device to access it on al our Macs without being connected directly to the NAS hard drive, as well as not having to copy that library to any specific computer.
A bit of Googling tells me that because Photos uses a database that is not intended for multi-user access, it just can't be done that way. You can move the photos to a NAS with them only directly available to one Mac and then share them with other devices within Photos itself. But the Mac that "owns" the photos must be on. Apparently if you also use iCloud, the external storage must be formatted as Mac OS extended (journaled), which means you have to use iSCSI on the NAS side.
