Answered
LrC wants to resync all files in an existing Catalogued folder held on a NAS
I am using Lightroom Classic 11.3 on MacOS 10 Monterey. My photo library is mostly stored on a Synology NAS connected via SMB. The Catalog is stored on the laptop as per Adobe requirements.
In order to have the fullsize images available, I just connect the Mac to the NAS via the finder using SMB. When I'm off my home network I use the smart preview functionality to work with images.
This has worked very well for years, with the shared folder appearing as an additional drive in the Folders list in LrC with a little green "light" showing when the NAS is available, and allowing me to browse the catalog regardless.
I've recently changed the NAS, but copied the data across and ensured that all the paths remain the same. The share name is still "public". The servername may be different (I always mapped the files via an IP address or servername and it didn't seem to matter and LrC never displays any file location info that includes the server name). When you map an SMB share on a Mac it mounts the folder in the /Volumes tree (eg smb://192.168.0.2/public is mounted as /Volumes/public and I wondered if that was how LrC recorded the file location).
When I click on a photo and select "Show in Finder" LrC opens a finder window to the correct file. There are no indications in the LrC UI that the link to the photos is broken. However, when I add extra photos to a folder on the NAS using the finder and then try to "Synchronize Folder" to get LrC to find the new file, it says it needs to import all the images in the folder to the catalog and delete the missing files (which it thinks is all of the ones it currently knows about). If I let LrC resync, it creates a new drive item in the folders list with exactly the same name "public" with just the folder that was re-synced listed within that tree. An outcome is that the Lightroom metadata is lost. I spent ages adding tags and ratings to photos.
How might LrC be identifying a difference in the hosting of the photos when it can still display them and send me to the correct finder location? Is there a way I can check what file location metadata Lightroom is storing, to see if there's something I need to change in the way I've mapped the SMB share? Or is there a better way of mapping the existing items in my catalog with the files on the new NAS?
Thanks for any help!
Steven
