Move from PC to Mac and want to use a NAS - how?

If you are going to move all your files to the NAS, then you are going to have to recatalogue them anyway, so you might as well just install LR clean on the Mac, use the NAS utilities to move/copy the files and then rebuild your catalogues from scratch.

I have just been through this exercise moving all my files (100k-odd) from multiple internal and external discs to a Symbology NAS.

After a couple of false starts, this is what I did.

1. Clean set up of NAS

2. Decide and create desired NAS shared folder structure

3. Copy files and directories onto NAS shared folder structure

4. Catalogue folder structure with Adobe bridge and set up some metadata, filters and collections to aid import to LR

5. Clean install LR on Macbook, making sure plenty of space available for LR catalogue preview database.

6. Make sure NAS and NAS disks are set to never sleep.

7. I did the following with Adobe Bridge and LR both open on a single desktop:

Bridge showing panels for folder tree, metadata, filter, on the left and folder content on the right.

LR open in library view.

The import.

I did this step a "major" folder at a time, where a major folder was e.g. All the images captured on a particular day at a game reserve, with any subfolders it contained, or a folder related to a specific subject, such as a wedding or a boat trip, plus subfolders. This yielded folders usually containing a few hundred images total of jpeg, raw, pdf and tiff files.

8. The import step repeated per folder as above:

a) in Bridge chose a folder to import. Make sure Show Items in subfolders and Show Hidden are ticked in the Bridge view menu dropdown.

b) Use the Bridge filter tab to choose the items you want to import by file type (Or other metadata option if you prefer)

c) Select all in Bridge and wait for selection to finish.

d) click Import in LR

e) Drag the selected items from Bridge to LR and wait for LR to compute the number of photos  - this should match the total of the file types shown in the Bridge filter panel.

f) Click Import in LR and wait for LR to finish importing, including preview generation. I used standard previews.

g). Repeat for next folder etc.

When you are done, you will have a cleanly created catalogue with all your images on the NAS.

When I had done this, i then deduplicated using Photosweeper in two passes: exact duplicates automatically marked and trashed first and similar images manually trashed as needed second.

So now I am left with single instances all of my images nicely organised on the NAS, (imported from 10 separate fixed and USB disks spread over three machines (2 mac, 1pc) and one WD Cloud device).

It was a bit tedious, but as I said, I tried using existing catalogue and I also tried importing a disk volume at a time and in both cases I encountered LR import problems which left me not knowing what was and was not on the NAS. Getting LR to repeat the import after a failure often doesn't work either and using Bridge to check shows the import results given by LR are quite often incorrect in these cases.

Using the drag from Bridge and drop to Import in LR always seems to work ok. I think it may be because the device navigation and selection is being done by Bridge and the import is actually a copy with correct source references, but i am not sure.

You must drag selected images from Bridge - dragging folders just makes LR recompile the folder contents and then you get LR import hanging, missing things etc.

At the end of this, I am left with about 60k images on the SAN and LR is working very nicely against them, with no performance issues, no hangs etc.

Worked for me.

Try https://www.lightroomqueen.com/how-move-lightroom-to-new-computer/

What kind of NAS?