In theory this is fine, however it is a bit slow and while it’s nice to have control over my images, over the years Apple has done what they always do and has improved Photos so that it’s now a much better product. It’s not perfect, but still decent from what I can tell.
So I’m thinking of going back to Photos, but I’d like to keep the images on my NAS as a completely independent backup of all my images. These will then be automatically backed up in the Cloud. Not that I’m paranoid or anything.
I have over 600GB of images(!) but a fast internet connection so I’m not overly concerned about the migration/upload. But I do have questions!
1. If I turn on Photo Library on my Mac and drag the images from my NAS in the Finder onto the icon in the Dock then what will it do with images if the meta data is missing? Does it use the file date? I have no idea what’s happened with meta data on my NAS. I was using Image Capture to take photos off my phone so I assume it took the meta data with it? But just thought I’d ask (this isn’t a biggie).
2. I don’t have enough free space on my Mac for my entire library. Is using an external USB drive my only option? I realise that there’s an “Optimise” option in Apple Photos, but presumably I need at least enough space for my entire library to get it to into Photos initially?
3. This is the biggie – How can I maintain a copy of my images on my NAS? I want this to be automatic, if possible. I have an unused Mac on my network that I could set to fire up and automatically sync Photos down from iCloud (I was thinking of doing this overnight) but then I need something to extract the images from wherever Photos puts them and copy just the high res original to a destination on my NAS for backup purposes.
Any general thoughts much appreciated, even if it’s taking a different route to the one I’ve very roughly outlined above.
