Sorry for the numpty question – I’ve tried a search without success…

I’m on the verge of buying a 2TB NAS for our data – which is mostly iTunes / iPhoto stuff. The problem I’m trying to solve is universal access to my files across an iMac, a MBP and 2 iPads – and an old wifi TV if that is possible…

Does anyone have experience of using a NAS with iPhoto libraries / iTunes? I’d hate to buy the thing and discover that iPhoto won’t work with a NAS or something.

Thanks in advance…

Had something similar a while back and it was always a bit of an awkward solution, at least with iTunes and iPhoto. At some point those apps would think the remote drive wasn’t available for some reason and get in a fit about where the library was. And trying to share the same library across multiple instances of iTunes or iPhoto… just don’t do it!

Maybe they’ve sorted some of the issues recently but IME you’re better off having it managed on a central computer (e.g. the iMac – I have a mac mini) that you leave on all the time and then use home sharing, photo streams etc. For other files it may just be easier to use something like Dropbox and do it all in the cloud. For wifi TV i just use Plex running on the mac mini. All i really use my NAS for these days is as a TimeMachine backup device with the mac mini as a server.

That’s my experience anyway.

I have a mac and a NAS drive, iTunes can see my NAS and plays any content from it as a shared device on the network. Make sure the NAS you choose has iTunes server capability.

You can store your library on there if you want, just make sure it’s available before opening iTunes. Also worth making sure you plugin to a cabled network before doing any big sinks, wireless is just rubbish for that.

For general usage the NAS appears as a network server in finder as soon as I turn the mac on so I can just browse to it and authenticate as a user.

I’m using a Synology NAS if that helps.

DO NOT buy any of the western digital offerings.

Qnap Nas boxes have an Itunes server built in.

http://www.qnap.com/i/uk/trade_teach/con_show.php?op=showone&cid=55&hf=1

whatever you do, do not use bastard pox ridden AFP to connect. Apple have neutered their own bloody protocol in mavericks….. i had to downgrade back to snow leopard to get the sodding thing working.

The above is sound advice re:iTunes.

iPhoto won’t really work right. You need (to be discontinued) Aperture or Lightroom if you need more sophisticated photo management.

Always amazes me that Apple still haven’t really sorted out the ‘single iPhoto library, single iTunes library, multiple user accounts’ thing.

I’ve tried various approaches to NAS and shared drives but none have ‘just worked’. For files we use dropbox AND Google Drive which both sync across two machines with two user accounts on each. That gives resilience and online backup.

Photos and music sits on a single user account on one machine which is backed up regularly to a time machine disc. All the sharing options are on but they’re not really a lot of use – I’m pretty sure you can’t sync an iPhone to a shared music library? Likewise you have to copy the photos to edit them and of course the edits are then only on the library you’ve imported them to.

I can only echo scrumfled’s remarks – Mavericks borked our NAS connections too – it can be fixed but it’s a total arse. Something to do with new SMB2 and most NAS’s still running SMB1 I think

Smokey – not sure what NAS you have, but on the Qnap you can log in to an SSH session on the NAS with Putty ( http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) and issue the command “smb2status” to check what is currently setup and “smb21enable” to enable SMB2 support if needed.

EDIT:

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=185&t=91436 for more info. I am not a Mac user, but have enabled SMB 2.1 on my NAS to improve speed with Windows clients.

iPhoto won’t really work right. You need (to be discontinued) Aperture or Lightroom if you need more sophisticated photo management.

Yup, looks like there’s a new Photo app to replace Aperture and iPhoto, and it’ll all be cloud based. Could be interesting.

May be worth having a serious look at iCloud with Yosemite (out later this month). All the cloud integration stuff may be a better option than a NAS. Sometimes easier just to go with the way Apple want you to work!

Never had particularly good experiences with using SMB. Found AFP or NFS to be the best options. Mostly use AFP with my LACIE NAS, but it’s really just used for TimeMachine now.

If you are all Apple why not get an Apple solution ? Lots of people use Mac Mini Servers which can run headless (ie no seperate screen/keyboard) for both business and private applications. I think you can set the Time Machine up to do this too and you get the Apple WiFi router as part of it.

I have head stories that the old iPhoto wasn’t up to commercial sized libraries, I would certainly have a backup of the raw images outside iPhoto.

I have a Mini with 750gb (only half full) with my music/films/photos etc on it and I used Home Sharing to see the media inc to an Apple TV. We also have some of the directories shared with my gf’s MacBook pro so we can share other files. I know it’s not so sexy/resiliant but you can attach external drives to the Mini and see those too over the network if you want (I don’t)

Lots of people use Mac Mini Servers

Yeah, this is what I do (though it’s also my day to day work mac too.) You can always get some direct attached storage if you need more or chuck a new HD in there. You end up with a proper computer and if you don’t have a monitor attached you can just use the remote desktop feature. You have a much broader range of applications you can install on it. It’s got decent CPU and memory (which most NAS don’t.)

You won’t have RAID discs (unless you have a RAID DAS) but I’ve yet to have a disc fail on a home NAS that hasn’t trashed the NAS (mostly QNAP ones.) Just make sure you back up your data (I back mine up to a local NAS and Amazon S3 cloud storage.)

Hi all,

I have experimented with this quite a lot and here is what I can add to the forum.

Hardware Setup:
Synology NAS DS214play (2bay raid0)
Gigabit Ethernet
Wi-Fi (g-standard)

MacBook Air (mid 2012 tested with Mountain Lion & Mavericks)
MacBook Pro (mid 2014 tested with Mavericks & Yosemite (as available as of OCT 2014)

Variant 1:
iTunes Library on NAS with WiFi Connected and tested seperately with gbit ethernet via usb2.0 (MBair) and USB 3.0 (MBpro)
-> Wi-Fi: playing music and video on the NAS on the MBair and MBpro was without any issues.
-> Wi-Fi: Synching content with my iPhone and iPad was without issues (more on the details later).
-> wired connection faster and more responsive on MBair
-> wired connection (USB 3.0) not working at all (compatibility issue with MBpro and Unitek Y3045 suspected) hence test invalid

Variant 2:
Moved iPhoto library ~50GB to NAS, same hardware setups

-> WiFi -> slow on MBair and MBpro. Slightly faster on MBpro I believe
-> Wired connection: Worked really well on MBair and USB3.0 gbit united y3045 adapter.
-> Wired connection: on MBpro not working see adapter issue above

=> general comment and reason why I had to move my 50+GB iPhoto library back to the MBpro (with larger SSD):

While working on the NAS with wired and non-wired connections on the MBair and MBpro showed mixed results the iTunes functions of playing music etc. was flawless. However, here is the big thing:

When you move your iPhoto library to a NAS-location. iTunes cannot (WONT!) synch and pictures, events etc. to your iOS devices. This was present throughout my tests, on all versions of iTunes OS X etc. since mid 2013 until now OCT 2014. Since I didn’t want to invest time and money in a soon to be discontinued Aperture etc. I just moved the library back onto the MBpro.

This is a weird behavior of iTunes that it won’t sync the picture content from the NAS, while it does everything like it should with the Music and Video files…. If you have any idea on how to fix it, that would be great.