I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up physical hard drives to sparse disk images that live on a Synology NAS on a several-times-a-day basis.

He creates a sparse image on the NAS, mounts it locally on the Mac, and puts the library in there: How do you get Photos to work with a NAS … - Apple Community

Nonetheless, this guy found a way to do it that adds a layer of safety that seems hard to dispute. Then Photos says “Photos needs to Quit because the library has become unavailable.” Then I restart the drive, restart Photos, and everything is always fine. For a reason that I don’t understand, my external Lacie RAID drives have been randomly going offline on a regular basis for YEARS. Well, that’s my problem to deal with.Īnd yet another concern is that disconnection of the network drive could lead to corruption.

I will never put it in a synced folder or share it with anyone, and I can make sure it’s HFS+.Īnother concern is that network storage will be slow. in a shared folder, where there’s a risk that two users may try to access (and therefore modify) the same library at the same time, which it’s not designed to do.īut none of that rules out NAS strictly.on a file system that is not HFS+, since I believe that the integrity of the library has been written in such a way that it depends on the journaling and other features of this specific file system it resides on.in a synced folder, such as Dropbox or iCloud Drive, where syncing it to another location could confuse and corrupt the library.Only “Storing your library on a network share can lead to poor performance, data corruption, or data loss.” If you open a different library in the Photos app, and you haven't designated it as the System Photo Library, other applications will use photos from the original System Photo Library. Hold down the Option key when you open Photos to see which library is set as the System Photo Library.But nowhere do I see an explanation about WHY it’s not safe. If Use as System Photo Library is grayed out, the current library is already set as your System Photo Library. Click the Use as System Photo Library button.After Photos opens the library, choose Photos > Preferences from the menu bar.Choose the library you want to designate as the System Photo Library.Hold down the Option key and open Photos. One of the photo libraries is already designated as YourLibraryName (System Photo Library).Additionally, all photos and videos from iCloud will redownload to the device. If you designate a new library as the System Photo Library and then turn on iCloud Photos, the photos and videos in the new library will merge with those already in your iCloud Photos.

Photo library mac network drive