this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Good way to store a lot of photos - hobby photography (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Loganthehatless@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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Hey Guys, My mum is doing semi professional photography and I am at my wits end. It’s a human and technological problem. I did a quick object count she has like 70k photos roughly 4tb. This happens because she takes every picture in raw and JPEG and a lot of series captures. The begin of the story is that she had at first a ssd, then a second, then a third and so on. I already bought a synology nas. And threw everything at it. But everything is messy and unsorted and she is not happy because she doesn’t get her chaos together and adobe Lightroom performs bad with network drives, and I don’t get why … but this seems to be a known problem… Anyways she uses Lightroom for her editing which is nice, but she is using more like a library and not to perform the actual changes, that’s the reason that the catalogue which is a db of the changes is a 17 gb.

She is not happy at the current state. Do you have suggestions, for a strategy to clear this chaos ? Or a cool tool for getting a folder structure? Maybe any tips and tricks for synology and network stuff ?

I Already tried to move files and get a structure but Lightroom hates this and loses track of the file. So a powershell script which sorts the items into year folders was a good idea but I am scared of bricking the db

The nas and the mac are all wired up on 1 gbit and I am sure it should be ok because the big raws are only like 70mb per file

Regards :)

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[–] dazchad@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

As an experienced software developer, I can confidently say that no amount of technology will fix a bad user workflow. Your best plan of action is to sit down with your mother and try to come up with a consistent workflow she is happy with. If she doesn't know or can't come up with one, find what is the industry standard (which seems to be year-month-date folders? I'm not a photographer), or maybe ask an experienced photographer friend. Remember you can adjust the workflow later, but it's important to have something stable while she is learning how she really likes to work.

Storing the photos in a NAS is a good choice. For the slowness, I suppose she would need to keep the most recent photos on her main computer/laptop, then move/sync to the NAS once editing is done? I don't see why one would need to edit old photos every day, so keeping only the most recent/active work on the computer seems smart.

adobe Lightroom performs bad with network drives

Most software perform worse with network drives because the host OS can't optimize as much as a local drive, specially so with random access like editing software do (contrast to copying/streaming a file, which is sequential). If performance is an issue, the only real solution is to copy files locally then sync back to the NAS. You can diminish the latency of network drives by having a SSD on the NAS, and a better link between them. Gigabit is a good start, but I'd go with 10Gbit because although the files are 70MB in size, lightroom is probably fetching several photos at the same time, and it will easily saturate your Gigabit link.

Good luck!