Best practice to use + with a Synology NAS?

[cxo]

Hi, there, I am new to this...

My NAS is a Synology 214+, it holds ca. 120,000 photos (RAW, TIFF; JPG); my computer is a brand new Macbook Air M1, both are connected via GBit. Unfortunately, Synology NAS systems do not allow any kind of direct access, only via network. When it comes to boatloads of photos, even GBit is slow. Did I mention the Synology has no 5GBit or 10 GBit connection? Only 1 GBit.

The first lesson I had to learn was: switch off AFP, use SMB to connect, it is much faster :-)

Well, faster... PM+ still gives an estimation of 1.6 days for metadata gathering, and I guess preview generation will be on top...

Are there any recommendations how to get the most speed and fun out of this?

[Kirk Baker]

Hi, there, I am new to this...

My NAS is a Synology 214+, it holds ca. 120,000 photos (RAW, TIFF; JPG); my computer is a brand new Macbook Air M1, both are connected via GBit. Unfortunately, Synology NAS systems do not allow any kind of direct access, only via network. When it comes to boatloads of photos, even GBit is slow. Did I mention the Synology has no 5GBit or 10 GBit connection? Only 1 GBit.

The first lesson I had to learn was: switch off AFP, use SMB to connect, it is much faster :-)

Well, faster... PM+ still gives an estimation of 1.6 days for metadata gathering, and I guess preview generation will be on top...

Are there any recommendations how to get the most speed and fun out of this?

If the speed of the connection to the data is slow, then building the catalog will be slow.  There's no settings that can improve this.

But even when the catalog is built (hopefully you have the catalog itself on a fast local disk), performance is not going to be stellar because Photo Mechanic Plus is not yet optimized for working with a NAS.  That will come in time.

-Kirk

[cxo]

Thanks, Kirk, the catalog is on the built-in SSD of the Macbook Air, that is faster than fast.

I am just trying to find tweaks outside PM+ that can help PM+.

[Chase]

I'm also using pm+ with a Synology NAS. It's borderline unusable at times which is probably just a limitation of internet speeds. I'm using a fiber gigabit connection but it still takes ~7-10 to Gather Sort Data and display images within a folder. the images are .jpg

[davidgordon]

But even when the catalog is built (hopefully you have the catalog itself on a fast local disk), performance is not going to be stellar because Photo Mechanic Plus is not yet optimized for working with a NAS.  That will come in time.

Out of interest: a know nothing like me assumes a drive is a drive no matter how its connected. What's different about a NAS drive and a directly connected one? I see both mounted on my Mac. I assume the connection is made by the operating system and applications are blind to that process.

Thanks.

[Kirk Baker]

David,

But even when the catalog is built (hopefully you have the catalog itself on a fast local disk), performance is not going to be stellar because Photo Mechanic Plus is not yet optimized for working with a NAS.  That will come in time.

Out of interest: a know nothing like me assumes a drive is a drive no matter how its connected. What's different about a NAS drive and a directly connected one?

They're extremely slow at reading small amounts of data from files.  They're decently fast when reading an entire file.

Locally connected drives (USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt/E-SATA) are usually very fast at reading/seeking around in a file.  They're also fast at reading the entire file.

-Kirk

[Martin Froland]

After usning Photomecanics Plus for more than a year, I found it was time to move my 4TB of photos from a USB attached drive to a Synology DS920+ NAS.
The NAS and the drives are chosen so that the NAS it self (drives, processer, ram)  was capable of deliver a good performance. With the Photomecanics catalogs on my PC's SSD drives, I did excpect af decent performance at least when scrolling and searching, as the PM database and thumbnails are stored locally. However - the performance is very poor. There seems to some kind of "lock" between catalog and the data, when disk is attached (mounted via LAN). Working purely dismounted / offline (no data disk /nas attached only browsing throug local catalog) has never been a problem.
I do hope that Camaera Bits can fix Photomecanics Plus perforance in a NAS environment sometime in a not so distant furture. I just love my Photomecanics Plus, that have brought my thousands of photos "back to live".
/Martin Frøland

[Kirk Baker]

Martin,

After usning Photomecanics Plus for more than a year, I found it was time to move my 4TB of photos from a USB attached drive to a Synology DS920+ NAS.
The NAS and the drives are chosen so that the NAS it self (drives, processer, ram)  was capable of deliver a good performance. With the Photomecanics catalogs on my PC's SSD drives, I did excpect af decent performance at least when scrolling and searching, as the PM database and thumbnails are stored locally. However - the performance is very poor. There seems to some kind of "lock" between catalog and the data, when disk is attached (mounted via LAN).

Correct.  If the files are available, they're used to load metadata, thumbnails and previews.

Working purely dismounted / offline (no data disk /nas attached only browsing through local catalog) has never been a problem.
I do hope that Camera Bits can fix Photo Mechanic Plus performance in a NAS environment sometime in a not so distant future. I just love my Photo Mechanic Plus, that have brought my thousands of photos "back to live".

I would like to make it possible to always use proxies on slow devices (either through a heuristic or via user choice per volume), and even ignore the metadata from the files themselves until it is time to modify them or the files (the image and any XMP sidecar file) have been modified since the images were added to the catalog.  Do understand that when this is implemented, your previews will always be limited in quality to the quality of the proxy images.  Though we could make it so that when desired, the full image could be loaded (though it would once again be slow.)

Unfortunately this is not a simple task and will take some time to implement.  And while I consider it a high-priority issue, there are higher priority issues I have to deal with before I can work on this.

-Kirk

[FlunkyFoto]

Hello Kirk,
The idea you explained would be exactly what I need. I hope that you will find time to implement it in the near future.
Sincerely,
Nicolas