Is there any way to store an Apple photos library on a FreeNAS?

[guglez]

Hi All,

I used iPhoto since 2013 on an AFP share on my FreeNAS without any issues. Then Apple released their photos app. It was fine at the beginning. But after an update of photos app I can't use my photos library stored on a FreeNAS box. Here is why:
every time you try to open your library photos app says that library is corrupted and I need to rebuild it. Rebuild takes several hours and at the end it asks to rebuild again and again. I googled a lot. Apple claims that you can't store photos library on an external NAS. They require an HFS+ (MacOS file system) volume. What can I do to store my photo library on FreeNAS box? Is there are any known workaround for this?

 

[joeschmuck]

I looked at the Fresh Ports site and found support for HFS but not HFS+, well support is being generous as no one is maintaining those files.

What can I do to store my photo library on FreeNAS box?

Do you really mean what can you do to access your already stored library? Can you roll back you Apple update and use the older application that was working fine?

 

[sweeze]

I have a small Photos.app library I can shove onto my FreeNAS to test, but Photos.app really does have some expectations on underlying filesystems that make it tricky. I use OpenZFS on macOS in addition to FreeNAS and there are some flags that had to get implemented to make volumes present themselves as HFS+ in terms of what Apple's applications expect and they usually work out well I elected to instead carve out a 256GB zvol formatted as HFS+ locally for my Photos.app use. (Essentially just to shovel photos around iOS devices and maintain/manage some family photostreams.)

It wouldn't solve your problem to use a zvol on a FreeNAS. One possible alternative is to keep your Photos.app library on an external disk that you back up to your FreeNAS, but I can appreciate that isn't what you are asking and probably don't need suggestions :)

 

[fracai]

For a while I had my library stored inside a disk image that I mounted over AFP. It was not the best experience. It worked, but was slow.

 

[guglez]

For a while I had my library stored inside a disk image that I mounted over AFP. It was not the best experience. It worked, but was slow.

Awesome idea!!!! Thank you. I will try.

Отправлено с моего HTC Desire EYE через Tapatalk

 

[fracai]

For what it's worth, I think I was using a sparseimage to allow for increasing the available space as the library grows.

 

[diedrichg]

I use Goodsync on my wife's Hackintosh. It syncs her photos library to FreeNAS. I know this replication works because this is how the library was stored prior to building the Hackintosh and then copying it from FreeNAS to the Hack.

 

[Wartooth]

I was in your same position a few months ago. To solve it I set up a zvol on FreeNAS and an iSCSI share of the zvol. You need a iSCSI initiator on the Mac client. There are a few paid ones out there, but I use the open source command line utility (https://github.com/iscsi-osx/iSCSIInitiator). I wrote an apple script to login/mount the disk so I could set it up for ease of use for the wife as well.

 

[lmannyr]

Did anyone ever

Hi All,

I used iPhoto since 2013 on an AFP share on my FreeNAS without any issues. Then Apple released their photos app. It was fine at the beginning. But after an update of photos app I can't use my photos library stored on a FreeNAS box. Here is why:
every time you try to open your library photos app says that library is corrupted and I need to rebuild it. Rebuild takes several hours and at the end it asks to rebuild again and again. I googled a lot. Apple claims that you can't store photos library on an external NAS. They require an HFS+ (MacOS file system) volume. What can I do to store my photo library on FreeNAS box? Is there are any known workaround for this?

Did you ever get it working?

I have setup my iPhoto by creating a disk image on the FreeNAS machine. The library was saved in that image. It was a PIA since I always had to have the disk image open before starting iPhoto. Also, only one computer on the network can use it at a time. If any of the computers on the network had a newer version of iPhoto, then none of the other "older" version iPhoto computer can open the library until updated. A bit of a PIA but it worked. And yes, it was slow.

I'm looking for a new solution.

 

[lmannyr]

I was in your same position a few months ago. To solve it I set up a zvol on FreeNAS and an iSCSI share of the zvol. You need a iSCSI initiator on the Mac client. There are a few paid ones out there, but I use the open source command line utility (https://github.com/iscsi-osx/iSCSIInitiator). I wrote an apple script to login/mount the disk so I could set it up for ease of use for the wife as well.

Can you elaborate on how to setup the iSCSI share on FreeNAS. How does the iSCSI get associated with zVol created for it?

 

[quaboag]

I was sharing my photos from my FreeNAS via AFP when I ran into the same "library is corrupted and needs to be repaired" issue. I switched to NFS which performed well, but a later update exposed new problems with live photos. After some hair pulling, it’s working fine. Here’s how I got it to work with NFS:

1. Create a dataset that’s case insensitive. (Important!!)
   
   The latest version of Photos, if you are trying to import Live Photos from your iPhone, is expecting a case insensitive filesystem. I don't think that an existing dataset can be converted to be case insensitive, so I created a new dataset with "Insensitive" selected and copied everything over.
   
   
2. Create a user on FreeNAS with the same uid as the user on the Mac, and set the permissions on the dataset to match.
   
   There might be a better way, but using an alternate id (even with user mapping) threw up permission errors in Photos.
   
   
3. And of course share the dataset via NFS.
   
   
4. (Optional) I’m pretty sure autofsd runs by default. Instead of going through the trouble of mounting the NFS exported filesystem, I opened the photos document on my Mac after navigating to /net/{freenas hostname or IP}/mnt/{freenas dataset path}. e.g. "cd /net/192.168.114.212/mnt/free01/photos"
   Use Shift-Command-G in the Finder to reach /net.

Needless to say, snapshots, and backups separate from the NAS are a good thing.