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Author Topic: Lightroom and NAS  (Read 8857 times)

AlexanderB

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Lightroom and NAS
« on: November 07, 2012, 03:16:58 pm »

Hi,

I am considering buying Lightroom (or Aperture) for using as a cataloguing application. I want to store my photos on the NAS (Network Attached Storage) and only previews on local computer. NAS is accessible only over WiFi. Will it work this way or not? What is your experience?
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RFPhotography

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #1 on: November 07, 2012, 03:51:13 pm »

It should work but it'll be slow.  An NAS isn't really intended for primary storage.  Generally an NAS is used as a part of a backup solution.  And WiFi is slow compared to wired ethernet.
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AlexanderB

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #2 on: November 08, 2012, 03:18:22 am »

What would you suggest then? Using USB portable drives and cables? It is so not convenient. What is intended for primary storage if not NAS?
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john beardsworth

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #3 on: November 08, 2012, 04:01:05 am »

Internal drives or a fast connection to external drives.
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jeremypayne

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #4 on: November 08, 2012, 06:46:10 am »

I have no problems using my NAS to store RAWs for my LR library ... but I usually access them via gigabit ethernet.

WiFi access works, but is a bit slow for real work.

Via gigabit ethernet, it isn't so bad at all.
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stingray

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #5 on: November 08, 2012, 07:36:46 am »

I have a dedicated drive for images (ie no O/S or other data, just images).  I have an automated tool which backs these out to a NAS drive when my workstation is not active. This gives me a reasonable blend of performance and security.

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Steve House

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #6 on: November 08, 2012, 07:49:39 am »

Hi,

I am considering buying Lightroom (or Aperture) for using as a cataloguing application. I want to store my photos on the NAS (Network Attached Storage) and only previews on local computer. NAS is accessible only over WiFi. Will it work this way or not? What is your experience?
Remember too that LR is much more than a mere cataloging application - it is also intended to take the raw - raw in both the sense of the raw data format and in the sense of unprocessed camera original raw material for the final image - camera original image file and process it into the final finished image and on to the final print if that's to be the ultimate destination.  It's the digital version of all the processes that took place in the darkroom in the analog photography days.  That impacts your storage strategy because there's a lot of data being transferred over the network as you work and connection speed can become a limiting factor.  I'd say a NAS would be fine for a backup archive of the original source files and perhaps exported copies of the final processed image files, but not so much for work "in-progress."  I'd want much faster file access for day to day working.
« Last Edit: November 08, 2012, 07:51:46 am by Steve House »
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RFPhotography

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #7 on: November 08, 2012, 08:12:20 am »

What would you suggest then? Using USB portable drives and cables? It is so not convenient. What is intended for primary storage if not NAS?

As, I think, Jeremy said, if you're going to store your images on a network device then a high speed ethernet connection to that device would be the better way to go.  USB external drives aren't all that fast either (maybe OK with USB 3).  Plus it gets messy when you start having multiple external drives stacked on top of each other.  I use a small external drive on the road so that I have 2 copies of all my images - one on the laptop hard drive, one on the external - in case something happens with one I still have the other to transfer to my main computer in the office.

I've got 4 internal 1TB drives for images, a 120GB SSD for the OS/software and a 6th 250GB drive that's got a bit of non-photography related data on it but it's primarily used as a scratch disk.  Everything gets backed up regularly and automatically via ethernet to my NAS which has 3x2TB drives in a RAID 5 (4TB total storage).  The automated backup doesn't include the LR catalogue because that gets done each week via LR when I shut it down.  The catalogue is backed up to the NAS.  The automated backup does include a system image.  Ideally I'd have a second NAS with one stored away from my office and swap them out but the budget doesn't allow for that at the moment.
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AndrewMcCormick

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #8 on: November 09, 2012, 11:53:36 am »

It is so not convenient.
neither is a really slow Lightroom :/  Even over Wireless-N, I find LR not real useable over Wi-fi.  At least not for production use.  If you just want to fire up a catalog to browse then it works fine. Of course just for browsing a catalog or other just catalog features, I find it faster to remote log-in to the faster computer that has the catalogs on the local drive and use it that way.

I've ran Lightroom with storing catalogs and files on a Windows Server machine at a studio for years. Access via gigabit ethernet and using a .bat file to subst the network drive on the local machine.  This has allowed us to access our catalogs from any machine on the network with out problem.  Though it is slower than internal drives, the real bottleneck has been in processing out the images.  Simple color correcting and library features has certainly been workable for that studio's needs.
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AlfSollund

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Re: Lightroom and NAS
« Reply #9 on: November 10, 2012, 02:50:02 pm »

Hi,

I use LR4.x towards a Synlogy NAS with RAID 5 over WiFi n (M9 raw files). I don't have any problems. In fact when comparing with photos stored locally on c there is little difference.

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