Hi Will, love the content. I recommend relocating the files through Lightroom and not through your computer's file manager. Also, keep your catalog local but photos on the NAS and tell the system to Build Smart Previews so you can still edit and see the current state of the images. These previews will stay with the catalog. Thanks for all the great content and for helping me set up my NAS.

FINALLY a Lightroom/NAS workflow that's easy to absorb and end to end. Many thanks for making it.

I just wanted to express my sincere appreciation for the concepts shared in this video. I am a perpetually disorganized photographer, but I recently built my own NAS and while I generally understood I could somehow use it with Lightroom, this end-to-end demonstration saved me so much frustration and inevitable procrastination in getting started! Thank you! I'm finally on my way to centrally organized and backed-up photos :)

This is exactly what I bought my NAS for. You're the best!

Hey Will! Your workflow seems interesting. But on first sight, it also looks rather inefficient and dangerous in case of backups. May I present you my current workflow? 1) First off, my shared folder for the whole management is "Photos" (will come in handy later). In there, I created two folders; "Editing" and "Photography". 2) Afterwards, I used Synology Drive on my MacBook to connect the folder "Editing" in two way synchronization. After a photoshoot, I'll copy the pictures into "Editing". So the next time I connect to the internet, my files get uploaded to the NAS, while staying available offline on my MacBook. 3) The Lightroom catalog is also placed within the "Editing" folder. That way, I have the ability to edit on my MacBook AND on my windows machine at home, which is setup identically to my MacBook and is hooked up to the same catalog. This allows users, who don't have powerful notebooks, to use both devices on location and at home. 4) Editing happens now either outdoors or at home. And a big bonus is that the files are always on the NAS. So in case of losing my notebook, I don't lose my clients pictures (very important). 5) When the pictures are edited, I export them to the second folder "Photography". There, it's like an archive. This folder is hooked up as "on demand" via Synology Drive. So I don't waste much space, but I gain the ability to access files if I need to. When the project is done, I move the whole project folder into the Photography folder, so I don't waste storage on my notebook. 6) Synology Photos is a great tool to distribute all the pictures to my clients. The main reason I used the shared folder "Photos" in the first place... This workflow offers: -more reliability (always backed up in case of notebook loss etc...) -Same editing speed as yours thanks to two way synced files -The ability to access your projects from multiple devices -Sharing with Synology Photos This may help or inspire some peoples workflow. Btw: without your tutorials, I would not have been able to come up with this workflow! Thank you Will!

This is great, Will.Thank you so very much. How about a way for us to consolidate catalogs from two different Macs (travel Laptop and desktop) And how about a video on consolidating RAW files from multiple Apple Photos/ iPhoto libraries to a single place on the NAS? Please? That would be epic!

Thanks! I truly appreciated the NAS and LRC setup. Super helpful.

Hey, @SpaceRex...you have a very 'amenable' presenting style that I appreciate. I find your inputs quite 'calming' and down-to-earth. 😁

Thank you for the time you spend to share all this with us for free! Quick q: which upgrade for a photo/videographer would you recommend: A) 10gbe connection, B) additional RAM, C) NVMe cache? I have the 1522+ NAS. Thank you again.

You can actually auto-mount the Lightroom folder ("Photography" in your case) after login: System preferences > General > Login Items > + and then select the folder. For older versions of macOS the setting is under "Users & Groups".

Hi Will, thanks for sharing. You mentioned it briefly at the beginning, but can you elute a little bit more why you specifically avoid storing the raw in the "photos" folder? This is why my raw files live. I also saw Noel's comments further down, but would still like to understand the rational of your suggestion. Sorry if I missed anything. Thanks!

This is exactly the videos I needed, as I am like a few others here who has purchased a NAS for this exact purpose. Thanks buddy!

Will, super thanks for making this as straightforward as possible. I've learnt much considering this is my first NAS. Thanks!

This is great. Can I ask if you can make a tutorial on how to find duplicates and delete on the NAS. thank you.

I have learnt a lot from you. Thanks for all the information

This is exactly how I do my workflow now. But one very important thing is backup of your NAS. I have a 4 bay and had one drive fail on me. I popped in a replacement drive and while it was rebuilding, a 2nd drive decided to quit and I was screwed. I had some of the photos backed up on another place, but not all. Frustrated I powered it down, sat on the problem for a while trying to figure out what to do next. A couple weeks later I powered up and the 2nd drive failure sort of disappeared and I quickly copied what I was missing off the NAS before the drive failed again. Lesson learned. Make sure you have that 2nd backup of your NAS.

I just built my first home server with an older MBP that was just laying around. I keep my new photos on the local drive on my newer MBP. Older photos are archived on a OWC Thunderbay 4 Mini with 4 x 2.5" SSDs with a total of 8TB in RAID 0. I have a second OWC Thunderbay 4 with 4 x HDDs for a total of 16TB in RAID 0 for a backup of my RAWs in the other RAID. So far I have the backup RAID drive connected directly to my MBP server but now that I know I can have my external drive for my RAWs on a server, I will be moving the Thunderbay Mini and connceting it to my server MBP too. They're connected via Thunderbolt to my server MBP and over Ethernet, so should be plenty fast for my workflow. The HDD DAS is somewhat loud with the fan and mechanical drives spinning, so its gonna be nice to have a much cleaner desktop while also being completely silent and have everything else running in my garage.

What works for me perfectly: 1) Save all Raws on NAS, 2) Create LR catalogue on NAS, 3) Import all photos, 4) Create Smart & 1:1 Previews, 5) Copy LR catalogue with previews to desktop or local editing drive, 6) Do all culling, editing, 7) for exports re-link catalogue to NAS - do your exports. 8) final step, just copy the LR catalogue back to the NAS. 9) Finish

Excellent topic. Thanks a lot. I would be interested in your thoughts how to include cell phone photos into your workflow, e.g. behind the scenes stuff

I use ACDSee Pro as my DAM - Digital Asset Management. Adobe LR is more streamlined to classify photos but ACDSee has more flexibility to filter and show the images and let you store the catalogs on the NAS

This is great, I already was doing something like it. Last week I went a step further and installed Synology Drive Client. And I setup Photography as an on-demand sync folder. So now I import directly to the Synology and when I am ready to edit photos from a particular day I just pin down that day's folder in my mac's Synology Drive, tell Lightroom that's the new location for that folder, edit, export, and when I'm done, I reference back the folder in Synology (in LR) and ask Finder to free space on the local Synology Drive copy. It works like a charm over ethernet, except for a general issue I'm having with Sinology Drive Client on my Mac and it is that it starts eating over my M2 Max resources like crazy (CPU and RAM) It must be a bug. By the way, my catalog and previews are also hosted in a pinned down sync folder.

Thanks! Your explanation was easy to understand and extremely helpful with my NAS addition. (Synology for Photographers Pt 1).

Great video. Glad you mentioned the metadata. Many times it seems to get lost or replaced, the EXIF data. My workflow includes ensuring all metadata is there and naming as year/event no/pic no and description with Mac Automator.

Your videos are always very detailed and provide all the necessary information to réplicate and go beyond chatting. Good work ! About the topic, wouldn't it be more user-mistakes-proof just to use Syno Drive to sync ? So LR files are the local versions and one takes advantage of the On Demand thing to save local space if required, by choosing in the explorer which folders/files are actually synced and not only linked.

Thanks for sharing this ... I really enjoy your videos and the way you put them together. I also enjoy that you are "real" in your presentation. I am revamping my workflow now and making some changes, but one thing I've done that is a modification to your approach I'd like to share. I like to always have more than one copy of my images from day one. I have had a "scratch space" on my local machine. I keep my shoots' RAW files in year and/or sport main folders, but the shoots are all labeled with a Year-Month-Title. When I come home, I initially copy the cards into a new folder with that name and simultaneously put it in the local scratch folder and on the NAS in the appropriate main folder. This is done manually, and from watching your video I'm going to try and see about if LR can do this in one step for me. I've thus far been old school of doing the file copy with folder, and then import. The main point of all this is that the scratch disk is where I do most of my initial work. The NAS is backed up to another NAS and cloud. So my initial step leaves me with 3 copies - Card, Scratch, and NAS main. By the time I need the card and recycle it, there will be a copy on the backup NAS. By the time I need space on Scratch its also now in the cloud too. When I'm done with the need for the scratch folder I can just delete it. When I need to access the files at some point in LR (if ever) it will report that the files are missing. I just need to repoint it to the NAS. So there is never a case I need to come back later and copy something from my local scratch area to the NAS. That space is always considered "scratch". It greatly improves my performance, but I'm never depending on it being there and can delete it at anything after the initial day without concern.

Well done Thank you

Could you do a tutorial on using Lightroom for iPad with the NAS, plus syncing that with a library that’s living on a Mac?

hell yeah! looking forward to this for while. thank you! 🤟🏼 -colton

So I am doing this a bit differently but the idea is similar When I import photos, it's going in my fast NVME (I'm on PC). I have a Synology Drive Backup set that backups my entire computer to the NAS every few hours, so I know that after each import, it'll be backed up, including my Catalog and my RAWs. Then every so often, when my NVME is running out of storage, I just delete them from my NVME, and I know that my RAWs are all backed up. No need to manually move the date/month/year folders to the NAS manually. I also will be setting up an external HDD to be a backup to my NAS so I have redundancy.

Hi! How can I use my catalogue files on the Synology nas? Is it possible?

I suspect you've probably addressed this in another video but what I would consider super, super important is the backing up of all of those raw files. That should be a key part of the workflow but I know you're well aware of this. Just feel like it should be mentioned in this video?

Will, a challenge from early in the video..”organize your files by date’. Direct conflict with Scott Kelby’s recommendation which is far more intuitive.

Thanks for this. The only thing I have noticed is the SMB share on my M2 Pro is sometimes slow to import new files, or just craps out when I try to transfer images to my Synology from my Mac Mini. I have another PC with that card readers (XQCD and CF Express) to transfer. Then I use the add function in LR, but even then, it'll take up to a minute to even see the Synology's file structure to even add the files to LR. The PC didn't have this problem... Frustrating....

I keep my raws in my actual project by year date. For instance Holidays year and then the holiday folder incs LR and VIDEO FCPx files and all the media for that.

Copying files between places within the NAD is much faster via DSM than over SMB.

How bad of an idea would be to put Lightroom photos folder inside of Synology Photos folder? To have people tagging, locations etc accessible from Synology Photos app.

Excellent subject ! Thanks. Just wonder why you do not move the files from the old to the new location inside Lightroom. It is as fast as copying outside of Lightroom and You do not have to change the folder location in Lightroom. That is done during the move.

Will, why do you not move the files from local to NAS within Lightroom (drag'n drop)? I am setup Option 2 but I only keep the non-processed RAW files on my local drive. As soon as I have processed them I move them to the NAS. This way I can move files individually after having created the folder on the NAS. Looking forward to Part 2, love your insights, keep going! Cheers from Switzerland.

Thanks for the video Will! When are you planning to release parts 2 and 3?

I only have the option in the first window to create in Volume1: btrfs encrypted. Will that encrypted be a problem later? I am not selecting encrypted later on as you demonstrate in this video.

Have you ever tested making a sparse bundle disk image to hold lightroom catalogue on the NAS? I just made a sparse disk, copied the catalogue to it, and opened in lightroom. Testing now

Very helpful! When you export, how do you organize these photos in terms of folder hierarchy? Becuase I would assume they are not going to stored in the "raw files" folder

Another super helpful video! Does this same workflow/process work for Lightroom CC? Rather than Lightroom Classic?

Hey Will, how can I edit photos that are on my NAS remotely? That is when the network drive is not mounted? Is there a way to still edit? Thanks!

This video was 8 months ago.. Can you still use a Synology with the new Light Room update, update 13? I will finish watching the videos you made, but I have been running my catalog over my Synology drive for at least 3 years, when I updated light room it cut the connection to my net work drive and the link to all the photos. I am now back on youtube trying to figure out how to fix this. I may need to hire you.

is it safe enough to store the lightroom library (and raw files) on the local computer an backup it via time machine? i have 1TB on my mac, so plenty of space.

Does this workflow let you view photos from Synology Photo app?

Whilst you mention not storing all RAW photographs on the NAS to work from, I do and found it to be snappy and totally responsive over a 10GBe connection

Needed this video !!!!

I don't see how Lightroom knows where the files are when you copy via the computer operating system. What I did was (in Lightroom) add a folder (click the + sign) and choose the NAS drive and shared folder you want. Then just drag and drop the local folders to the NAS. I'm pretty sure that is the Adobe official way to transfer safely.

Hey Will, I just set up my 923+ NAS. This is my first NAS experience. I do a lot of video editing. I’ve got an enormous amount of video files on 8TB external HD. What is the best way to transfer these files to the NAS? Can I plug the external 8 TB HD directly into the NAS (USB on the front of the NAS) and then from my MACBOOK see the 8TB drive and then drag the folders over to the NAS to start the file transfer process? Thanks

In my case the loading time of the photos in lightroom or luminar is a huge lot longer if my photos are saved on my NAS. Are there any tips to fasten this up? I can't work like this it's so darn slow... The cataloge is locally saved.

Excellent timing, been wanting to learn about NAS/Lightroom workflow. I would like to work exclusively off the NAS to edit all RAW photographs. Will this be smooth over a wired 1GBe Ethernet connection with a LR catalog of 200,000+ photos in varying sizes of 10-100MP (10-200mb per file) files? Currently working on a PC with 190mb spinning HDDs. Would there be any performance gains in upgrading to 10GBe for LR workflow?

Thanks!

Great video, gives me better insight for a mobile workflow. If I want to work from both a desktop and laptop how would you suggest I do that since Lightroom only allows the catalog to be on a local drive? Work off a pluggable SSD and move it between devices?

Hello Will, I was starting to learn about NAS and synology so I don't remember in which specific video I heard you saying that lightroom would not work on a NAS, my question is, is this a situation that changed in the last years/months and now you can? or I misunderstood what you said in that video, thanks

GET TO THE TOPIC!!!!

How would this work with Lightroom Cloud as this also now offers a local option?

Great video! Can you use the same folder and pictures for Synology Photos and your Lightroom photos? Thus taking advantage of the Mobile features while also using Lightroom Classic to edit?

I tried using Synology Drive to synchronize the catalogs between my machines; however, it proved to be unstable. The catalogs frequently became corrupted during synchronization between different computers. As a result, I switched back to iCloud, and now everything is working fine again.

Will do you have a video on how to add a 10gb connection to the NAS? I need to add a 10gb PICe card to my Windows desktop. I already have the Synology 10gb card installed on my Synology 1620+. Thanks for your videos!

any way to run catalog from NAS? I get error message when I try to

Awesome video! I have my LRC on an external drive. Is there a setup to have the entire LRC catalog sync'd to the NAS to automatically update any changes I make to my catalog? Right now, I manually copy the catalog once a week or so using Carbon Copy. Thanks!

Hey Will, Is the part 3 coming anytime please ?

What if you have a laptop and a desktop. How do you share the catalog/index on both?

I when I start up my computer and open Lightroom, it does not see my images on the Nas until I go to Finder and click on the Nas. Is there a setting or some thing to have it connect automatically

Hi, Will. I'm just getting started with a NAS unit with Lightroom and am digging into your videos. (Thank-you; I'm finding them helpful and am so glad to have found you.) A question: on import into Lightroom, why wouldn't I make a DUPLICATE COPY to the NAS unit and then UPDATE the location of the files when I'm done with the local raw files? You're copying them in this video and then pointing Lightroom to the new location when you're done with the local files and want to remove them. But could you just copy them to the NAS upon import so that the RAWS are backed up as well - and then update the primary location when done and remove the RAWS from the local spot? Hope I'm making sense. I'm trying to find a workflow that will help keep my laptop "thin" and have a backup / storage on my NAS and be able to use my NAS with Lightroom with files that aren't "current".

I think I may have missed a step... I keep getting the message Lightroom will not work on a network nas...... Do I need to keep the Lightroom "catalog" local on my iMac?

Wondering if you can do a basic video on backing up on truenas scale? I have a smb share, Nextcloud and a few other apps. My apps have there own datasets but I can’t find a good video on one stop backup

Will! So in my case I have my catalogs stored on my Synology Drive on my MacBook which syncs to my NAS. And I have all of my RAW files on the NAS. Would you still recommend I keep my workflow this way since this is what you suggested to me several years ago? OR is there a better way of doing things?

I'm just setting up my computer iMac and 3 year old Nas and new Lightroom , is it possible just to set up new category straight onto the Nash Drive or do I have to put it onto a USB drive first and then go through the procedure you have mentioned in the video and recreate the links in order for it to work... thanks

I'm already synchronizing my photo and video folders from my desktop to my Synology NAS, can I just point Synology photos to these folders that are on the NAS already and have it work with those?

Will, I am using your process of copying my photos from a Drobo 5N to a Synology DS1522+. I copy a folder from Drobo to Synology - What I am finding is that the folder on the Drobo that I copied to the DS1522 is not the same size (Bytes, File number and Folder number) once the copy is completed and location is update in the Lightroom catalog - should it be? By the way, I am really enjoying all of your content related to Synology NAS technology; Thank you so much!

I'm unsure about how you're just double clicking on the photography folder and having it mount like a drive, mine doesn't do that and only opens as a network folder.

If you put the LightRoom Catalog on the NAS, can it be shared between a Mac and a Windows machine?

I have been looking for this for a while.....many thanks for bringing it over!!! Is it worth adding SSD cache to the Synology drive for this process?? Would it make any difference? Thank you

Quick question , on a windows PC , which letter do you start when assigning a drive letter ? I started with Z and I add in reverse. So Z,Y, X etc …

Does any know if I want to speed up editing on NAS, what setup can I do? any special settings or using a super fast speed SSD?

Why is impossible to work on a Lightroom catalog directly from the NAS using the 10Gbs ethernet cable? Having the lightroom file in the same folder where you have the pictures. This is a really huge gap.

Hey thanks for all advices and guidelines. I have a massive catalog on a 220j and the system is getting very slow, to the point I can't import my new raw files. Would it help lightroom classic if I indexed the main folder? Are there tricks I can use to avoid lightroom freezing / not responding outside of the configuration you advise for speed in your other video?

My GF runs Lightroom on her older laptop which occasionally bogs down under the load especially when she also has GIMP open. It made me wonder if we should create a VM of her laptop on our DS920+. (We also have a QNAP TVS-h874 which is a powerhouse which would be an even better candidate for a VM but I'll leave that as an aside as it's not Synology.) We could also move the VM as we upgrade the NAS in the future. Are there any merits to this idea ? Backups are not an issue as the 920+ is backed up to 2 other locations plus snapshots ( you taught me well). Or, could you run Lightroom as a Docker app on the 920+ ?

Can you talk about using Synology Drive for photos? I would like to keep my RAW files on my computer (or external SSD) and use Drive as a backup and to allow access from my laptop when traveling. Any thoughts?

I like your shirt!

Hello, a question, can I work with a catalog directly from the nas?

THANKS

I plan on connecting my computer via ethernet to my router for the faster wired connection. Is there any additional advantage to connecting my computer to the NAS directly via ethernet? I don't have a NAS yet but am a professional photographer and will buy one soon to run a similar setup.

A lot of manual work.. what is this 🤔 🤔

Hi will, thanks a lor for all the great content you share with us. I'm a pro photographer and have a very different workflow that works for me but that's not the point of my comment. When I'm "done" with a client's projet, I Clean all the files I dont want to keep, then I export my raw files and lightroom edits as a new catalog in a folder on my NAS. Sometime I have to go back to a specific project. The issue is lightroom doesn't let you open a catalog file stored on the network (the *.lrcat). So I have to temporarily copy the catalog file on my local driver to launch it. It is not a big deal but I was wondering if there is a way of "tricking" lightroom to believe you open a local file when you are in fact opening the file on the nas ? thanks a lot

I only wish I’d watched this one before I copied 52,000 photo files via Lightroom drag & drop. 😂😂😢

Hey mate, My current set up is a PC and Macbook. Do I share the same catalog for both computers on the NAS drive too and load from there?

Any ideas with Lightroom IPad?

Why do you not use the premade photo folder? I’ve been using a synology for a while, and it is dreadfully slow for Lightroom. But I am using that photo folder, is that why?

Ah this is amazing thank you! A little off topic, but what do you find is the best ethernet adapter for your MacBook? I don't have the 10gbe card in my 1819+ but I'd still like to have 2.5gbe. its very hard to tell which hubs will actually give me that proper connection thanks!

Can you edit files that are located on the NAS thru wifi? Many thanks!

Hi Will, I am rewatching your Lightroom series as I am still facing the same issue--when I delete photos/videos from Lightroom, a popup appears stating it cannot delete the content. I dismiss the popup, go to NAS folder and lo & behold, the deleted content is not there. That's good, but what's not good is that they are not in the NAS's trash bin. Anyone else facing this issue? It's been bothering me for months at this point. Synology says to contact Adobe, Adobe says what's a NAS... I use W10 with 1522+, latest OS / software. Thanks and amazing work Will!

Do you have any thoughts on Synology stops hosting old reinstall files making older NAS completely unusable?

OMG do not do anything in this video! The transferring method with corrupt your driver. The only safe way to work is to use an external then in LR move the files when done.

Why Mac? I am willing to bet 75% or more of your audience is on PC.