Best practices for working from a NAS / Synology

[ddegner]

I have 20TB of photos on my local Synology and often get calls for archived photos.  When I try to open up an archived days shoot in Photo Mechanic it will simply beachball, usually for hours if I let it.  So I usually have to download the full folder to my local hard drive and search for and edit photos from there.

1) Are there any good settings to prevent Photo Mechanic from beach-balling?

2) What do other people do to get around this issue?

3) Are there any plans to make Photo Mechanic work better when working from a NAS?

4) Would it be possible to make it load more elegantly on a slow connection? 

5) When loading photos from my archive I think I would prioritize something like this a) File names b) Color/Ranking c) Caption info d) Low-Res previews. What do other people think?

6) I own Photo Mechanic Pro also, but it's archive creation process is so slow that I haven't been able to leave my computer at home for the few days that it requires.  I really should try it again.  Is this the answer to all of my issues?

[ddegner]

I'm still thinking about this and would love to hear any experience or tips.

One of the better options I came up with was to turn off RAW rendering, shoot in JPEG+RAW, with JPEG on the smallest size so that it pulls the preview from the small jpeg.  Unfortunately. most of my archive is still large JPEGs.

[Kevin M. Cox]

Make sure your laptop is on ethernet (and not WiFi) for sure. Also sorting by Filename instead of something like Capture Time will really speed up the contact sheet.