Photo Library + unRAID + Mac/PC??

[teamhood]

Hey guys -

 

I wanted to throw a topic out there and understand how everyone else is centralizing their photo library with unRAID and pointing to the Network attached drive...

 

I've been doing CrashPlan dumps to my unRAID server and also to a linux box that I have offsite all form a MacBook Pro that was my main Photo hub. I've recently switching to a MacBook Air and sold off the Pro and now have a huge problem - the Air is only 128GB, which I didn't really care about because I wanted to load all my Photos onto my unRAID server and just link to Network drive.

 

After researching for a few hours tonight, this is something that is not easy done without some serious workarounds. It's quite shocking to me as I was just going to point the Picasa or iPhoto to a network share... Oh how I can't believe this isn't something simple.

 

So what are you all doing? I assume that a lot of users here use or want to use their unRAID as their main hub for their Photo library...

 

Thank you,

[speeding_ant]

Anything that uses a database has problems via netatalk, it's not recommended. Hence, iPhoto and Aperture have problems.

 

I'm fairly certain you can store a Lightroom catalog on your MacBook Air, and point it to your photos stored on unRAID. There should be no technical reason why this wouldn't work. Storing the catalog on unRAID will not work, and Adobe does not support this.

[PeterB]

I know next to nothing about Mac, but I use digiKam on Ubuntu.  The digiKam website claims support for Mac OS.

 

According to the digiKam application, it won't work over a network - however, I have no problems with all my photos and database resident on my unRAID server.

[speeding_ant]

I know next to nothing about Mac, but I use digiKam on Ubuntu.  The digiKam website claims support for Mac OS.

 

According to the digiKam application, it won't work over a network - however, I have no problems with all my photos and database resident on my unRAID server.

 

+1, though not sure how netatalk deals with databases. Proper AFP turns off client side caching when it detects a database - and AFP doesn't fully support bit locking - so it's not the ideal place to store a database. If you are running a database (sqlite, etc) on any share that has client end caching enabled then you set yourself up for corruption.

[teamhood]

I tried getting digiKam to work on my OSX laptop, but had some problems. I'm looking into Lightroom, but I'm still playing around trying to get the catalog on the unRAID server to be connected to the laptop.

 

 

[speeding_ant]

I tried getting digiKam to work on my OSX laptop, but had some problems. I'm looking into Lightroom, but I'm still playing around trying to get the catalog on the unRAID server to be connected to the laptop.

 

The catalog on the server won't work well. I'd suggest using DropBox to store your catalog, and syncing it between the computers you want to use LightRoom on.