iPhoto library on the FreeNAS box

[Zealot]

I have a FreeNAS 8 box that stores all my media, including photos. FreeNAS box has two ZFS formatted mirrored 2TB hard drives.

I'm getting rid of my old desktop PC and replace it with Macbook Air. Is it possible to have all my photos stored in NAS and still use iPhoto to access and sort them? If i understand correctly, iPhoto doesn't just show photos, but creates a mac specific library out of them.

My wife has a Windows 7 laptop that uses FreeNAS also, mainly the photo folders, and she has to be able to access them easily. Her computer sees NAS box as a standard network drive.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm really not sure what you are asking. FreeNAS stores files. If you can change your settings to point to a FreeNAS shared location, then yes you can do what you want.

The REAL question is what iphoto can/can't do. For that you'll have to ask an Apple forum unless someone here happens to know it works.

 

[jgreco]

Yes, you can use iPhoto with FreeNAS. However, it may be a problem to access those pictures outside iPhoto. While iPhoto does have a nice user interface, it doesn't readily expose the organization of your pictures in a way that's obvious through the filesystem; you may need to do some additional work to jerry-rig a way to organize your pictures in the filesystem, then import them to iPhoto. Potentially lots of work. You also don't want a Windows client inadvertently messing with the iPhoto instance's files, which specifically includes making any changes to them, and while self-discipline may be sufficient, permissions forbidding it is a better suggestion, because a borked iPhoto installation is a Pain In The Arse. Also beware that there are ins and outs to sharing via AFP vs NFS; NFS is "less supported" in recent releases of OS X despite possibly being a better technology on a multiuser machine.

 

[JaimieV]

Alongside jgreco's post, there's another way to arrange your data.

Keep your photos organised as they are on the NAS. In iPhoto Preferences, Advanced, untick "Copy items to the iPhoto library". Drag the photos over to iPhoto manually, grouping them into "Events" or whatever as you wish.

Doing this will mean iPhoto references the originals from the NAS. The local iPhoto library will be used for metadata, organisation etc, but will not touch the originals, only read from them.

On the down side, if you want to use iPhoto to import things from your phone/camera (including via Photo Stream), these would be saved into the iPhoto library not to the NAS. So instead you have to manually get them over to your NAS folders, then manually import them into iPhoto. Any edits you make will only be saved into the local iPhoto library, they won't overwrite or save next to the originals - you can drag'n'drop changed photos from iPhoto out to the filesystem though.

I do this, for historical reasons (I wasn't confident in iPhoto's storage back in 2005 when I went Mac!). Having to do things manually is a minor annoyance which means I pull the photos off the phone+camera about half as often as I should, but it all works fine.

(You can do basically the same thing with iTunes, btw - keep your music/movies/etc on the NAS, untick "Copy to iTunes library", and manually manage the folders. I do this too.)

 

[jgreco]

That's more or less what I meant; the problem is that you have to create an organizational structure outside of iPhoto to store the pictures, which is problematic. The problem you'll invariably run into is the "/photos/christmas/1234.jpg really belongs in /photos/birthday", try to "fix" it on the NAS, and break iPhoto. It is ugly all around. You can opt for the "pictures break when you move them" option of not doing the "Copy to iPhoto", or the "duplication of data" option of letting iPhoto make a copy, and each decision leads to suck.

 

[cyberjock]

Not trying to Apple bash... but I've seen that Apple is BIG on doing things their way and in a way that you are forever locked into their product or you get handed a big bag of poop to clean up. My friend's music is not organized at all thanks to itunes. If he ever leaves itunes for an Android phone he might as well delete his collection and start over.

At this point you should make a decision on how to proceed. I don't have any particular products I'd recommend, but I'd see if there is a program out there that will work well for organizing the files as well as inside the program, and is smart enough to "fix" things if you move a picture from a birthday folder to a Christmas folder. I think that Adobe has a good program for that, but I'm not 100% sure.

 

[JaimieV]

Agreed with both of you. iPhoto is a photo-filer-for-the-masses, and is expected to be used as an "automatically suck your photos into here and they'll always be well arranged for you" tool by people who wouldn't know what a directory was if it bit them. It's really pretty excellent for that, and much less messy than eg Picasa which tries too hard and fails on usability.

Adobe Lightroom or Apple's Aperture are appropriate tools for enthusiast/pro photographers who need to sort amongst lots of pics, but not much good for the family snaps. They do both comprehend the need for multiple copies of your images on multiple hard drives, though! Which is neat.

By the way, even if you do use iPhoto with a NAS store, moving photos around in the NAS side won't actually break anything, iPhoto is a lot more resilient than that. If you try and open the moved picture in iPhoto (it'll keep the thumbnail for you to click on) it'll complain about missing stuff, and you can then right-click and reconnect them. Or just delete the pic in iPhoto, move it in the filesystem, then drop it back into the right event in iPhoto.

And you can always get photos out of iPhoto by simple drag and drop, there's no need to mess around inside its image database folders. If I was starting again, I would actually use iPhoto the way it is intended.

 

[JohnnyFreeNAS]

I know this is an old post but I'm still having trouble finding the best solution. I used picasa for years and that solved the problem. Now that google has gone to Photos and stopped making picasa available for download its hard to stick with picasa. I have been playing with putting the iPhoto library on the FreeNAS filesystem but i keep running into permissions issues. The Apple support site says to remove the owner attribute but i don't see a way to do that in FreeNAS. Picasa or iPhoto do very similar job as far as sorting photos for me. the advantage to the iPhoto libary is that live photos are kept whereas in picasa they are flattened to a standard photo.

 

[scwst]

Have you considered XnView? Runs on all kinds of platforms. I'm in the process of (slowly) replacing our MacBooks by non-Apple machines, and that's what I'm probably going to go with: http://www.xnview.com/en/xnview/