Using Your Synology NAS with Lightroom Classic | Storing Your Photos Part 4

By Wayne Kenward

Using Your Synology NAS with Lightroom Classic – Part 4

If you haven’t already done it, sign up to the COAP Academy,  Rich and Tom will cover the Lightroom catalogue and folder structures. 

Lightroom Catalogue and Images

It is critical the Lightroom catalogue runs on a local drive, ideally an internal fast SSD.  It’s basically a database of all your images, edits and previews and can get pretty big over time.  Lightroom is constantly reading and writing to the catalogue, DO NOT store the catalogue on your NAS.

Your photos can be stored on your local drive if it has a large enough drive, on external drives or on a NAS. Lightroom Classic will work fine with all these locations. 

Image Structure

This is a personal preference, find a solution that works for you and stick to it.  I’ve found a structure that works for me, but my way may not be the best way for you. 

I separate my files into two main sections, the images direct from the cameras, which I call my masters and then the exported image I may want to share or display.  I do the same for drone work and videos.  I use zzz Masters - DO NOT OPEN OR EDIT for my masters and Photo Albums for the edited exported images.  I have sub folders for each subject type of photography.

In the subject folders, I use a date shoot and a description for the folder names, so it is easy to sort in date order.

This folder structure is replicated in zzz Masters - DO NOT OPEN OR EDIT and Photo Albums

As I’m using the Synolgy Driver Sync Server, all files on my office NAS and home NAS are the same and the path I use to access them is the same.

Using Multiple Devices and the Lightroom Catalogue

I have 3 devices I use for Lightroom editing.

Tower  Workstation    Home Only

Laptop Workstation   Home, Office, Remote

Laptop Ultrabook        Remote, a little home or office.

As the catalogue holds all the information on your edits, it is key that the catalogue information is the same on all three You could work on 3 different catalogues and then merge the catalogue so they are all the same.  Another option, which I find easier is to have one catalogue and use the Lightroom backup as a way of moving the catalogue between systems. 

I have tried different ways of syncing the Lightroom catalogue using OneDrive, Egnyte, and DropBox, but had issues with all of them, and a corrupt catalogue is no fun. The Lightroom backup and restore works well.

My workflow is:

• Edit Tower at home, exit, save catalogue to NAS.
• NAS syncs catalogue and images
• Laptop – copy the last Catalogue backup from the NAS to C:\Lightroom Catalog-High-N-Dry
• Open Lightroom on my laptop, edit, save catalogue to NAS.
• Repeat

This works really well and I’ve had no catalogue issues, you just need to remember to make sure you copy the last backup from your NAS to you laptop before working remotely.

Remote Working

Now let’s look at remote working.  You can access you NAS via QuickConnect, yes it is quick if you have good internet where your NAS is and where you are, but nowhere near quick enough for work with Lightroom.  Therefore, we need a way for Lightroom to have access to the files locally.  There are 2 options.

• If your laptop supports 2 x SSDs, fit a large second SSD.
• Use a fast external USB-C or Thunderbolt portable drive. SSDs will be faster, smaller, lighter and require less power than a hard drive, but will cost more and are limited to 8Tb and below (currently).

The problem here is if you have mapped your Photography Shared folder to P:, the second SSD or external SSD are likely to be a D: and Lightroom won’t see the images. 

One simple way is to use Disk Manager to change the second SSD or external SSD to use the same drive letter you used to map the Photography share, that way Lightroom will see all your images.

Working On The NAS

Working Remote

You can manually copy the folder and images from your NAS to you second SSD or external SSD as and when, or you could use the Synology Drive Client to automatically keep your second SSD or external SSD in sync with the NAS.  

Synology Drive Client

You can download it from Download Center | Synology Inc.

Drive Client App Setup

(In this example the local SDD is D.)

The requirement I will use as the example is for the Drive Client to sync some of RAW files to an external 4TB USB-C hard drive.  This will be a selective sync as there are 13Tb on the NAS, too much to sync to a 4TB SSD.  Yes, there are M.2 SSDs larger than 4TB, but they are very expensive and the larges I’ve found so far is 8TB. 

4TB drive using drive letter D:

I want to sync some folders on the “Shared Folder” named Photography on the Synology to the USB-C D: drive. 

Install the Synology Drive Client

It will start the setup wizard after it finishes the installation.  The wizard will run through the same options as clicking on the Create button if the Drive Client is already installed.

Fill in the QuickConnect URL of your NAS (Control Panel – External Access) if you want the sync to happen both when connected locally to your NAS or remote.

Enter your User ID and password (not the admin credentials.)

Click Next, it should say

 If it connects, and you set 2FA, it will prompt for your code.

Select “Sync Task”

Select the Shared Folder you want to sync from in the “Folder to sync your NAS”.  You can drill down and select a subfolder or subfolders, but I suggest you follow this method as it by far the easiest.

Select D:\  in the “Folder location on your computer” (If you local drive is D:. if P: select P: etc))

Untick “Enable On-Demand-Sync to save disk space on your computer”

Click on Advanced

Untick the top box to deselect all folders.

All folders will no longer be selected.

Tick ONLY the folders you want to sync.

Click Apply and click past all the messages.

You will now have a two way sync set up, that will now start to sync files down to your USB-C drive, replicating the source folder structure.

If you want to change the folders to sync, click on Sync Rules and change the folders that are selected.

NOTE:  It is a 2 way sync, if you delete a folder from the USB drive, it will be deleted from the NAS too.  It is best to edit the sync rules to remove folders from the USB drive.

High ‘N’ Dry Photography Synology Use

I’ve work for many many years with two Synology NAS devices, one at home and one in my office.  Using the Synology Drive Server, both NAS are synced over the internet, and I also have remote access from my laptops, iPad and iPhone, all secured with 2FA.  I’ve been connected to a 1Gbps wired ethernet network and had very little issues with speed of editing.  Recently I’ve installed CAT6A cabling at home and upgraded to a 10Gbps network.

I’ve also fitted large volume SSDs into my tower and laptop workstations, allowing me to work locally.  It is faster than working via the NAS on 1Gbps, but not that much and working over 10Gbps ethernet and local, I can’t see much difference at all.  So why did I do it you may ask?  With my tower workstation, I was living on a building site with only WiFi to the NAS and it was very slow accessing files over WiFi 6, on my laptop workstation, I wanted the ability to edit offline. 

I’ve always had Hyper Backup sending an immutable backup to Azure, complete ransomware protection.

I have Lightroom set to access my master images via the local D drives, Lightroom doesn’t access the P drives, but all systems have access to the P drive for edited images and in the case of the X1 Nao laptop, it can access the folders not synced from for P:\zzz Masters - DO NOT OPEN OR EDIT, however, I don’t use this much for editing as the GPU is now very powerful (see my Blog: Do I need a super computer to use AI? | COAP Online blog).

Equipment List

Synology RS1221RP+

• 10Gbps Network Card
• Dual 400Gb M.2 SSDs RAID1 Cache
• 8 x WD Gold 4TB HDDs using SHR-2 providing 21.8TB

Synology DS1552+

• 4 x 1Gbps Network Cards
• Dual 400Gb M.2 SSDs RAID1 Cache
• 4 x WD Gold 8TB HDDs using SHR-2 providing 21.8TB

Lenovo ThinkStation P5 Workstation Tower        

• 2TB C: Drive with C:\Lightroom Catalog-High-N-Dry for the Lightroom catalogue
• 16TB D: Drive (3 x 8TB SSDs in RAID 5) has a synced copy of all photos on my NAS in P:\zzz Masters - DO NOT OPEN OR EDIT
• P Drive mapped to the Synology NAS Photography shared Folder.

Lenovo ThinKPad p1 G7 Workstation Laptop      

• 2TB C: Drive with C:\Lightroom Catalog-High-N-Dry for the Lightroom catalogue
• 8TB D: Drive has a synced copy of all photos on my NAS in has a synced copy of all photos on my NAS in P:\zzz Masters - DO NOT OPEN OR EDIT
• P Drive mapped to the Synology NAS Photography shared Folder.

Lenovo ThinKPad X1 Nano G2  Lightweight Laptop        

• 1TB C: Drive with C:\Lightroom Catalog-High-N-Dry for the Lightroom catalogue
• 4TB USB-C M.2 SSD D: Drive has a synced copy of all photos on my NAS in P:\zzz Masters - DO NOT OPEN OR EDIT\Aviation (not enough space for all subjects)
• P Drive mapped to the Synology NAS Photography shared Folder.