Frustration and Secondhand Embarrassment Recreating Catalog on macOS Sonoma

Report · May 24, 2024

Im not a photographer, we just save all our family memories.

Recently migrated from Windows 11 to macOS Sonoma when we bought an Apple M3 Pro with 18GB of RAM. The first thing I did was try to move the photo catalog of approximately 130,000 files from the SSD of the Windows machine to macOS. It is worth mentioning that the files reside on a local NAS, with which I had no problems from Windows. It was frustrating that I couldn't reconnect the folders in any way, neither using SMB nor AFP. I currently use AFP because using scripts via Terminal works very well and seems reliable to me.

Faced with the frustration of not being able to reconnect the folders, I decided to create a new catalog v13.3, believing it would be the best way to avoid problems. At least for the past two days, I've had the machine running almost 24 hours trying to rebuild it with no luck, but it has been impossible. It remains frozen for a long time, the Activity Manager shows it using 0 CPU, 0 network, and 12GB out of the 18GB of RAM. sounds like a memory bottleneck problem and the UI doesnt help at all to debug whats happening. It is very frustrating. Has anyone else experienced this or found a solution?

Report · May 24, 2024

Hello... first of all welcome and we will get you sorted but

DONT IMPORT AGAIN!! It is almost never the answer.

so we need to understand clearly what you did to move the catalog and how you tried linking the images again.

are you not seeing the NAS on your Mac? Does Lightroom see the NAS??

Report · Jun 07, 2024

Finding Missing Folder on MacOS (ex Windows 11 Catalog)

This is the screeshot of the error I receive when I try to reconnect on my MacOS. The problem persist using SMB or AFP. The catalog is 13.3.1 on MacOS Sonoma 14.5.

Report · May 24, 2024

Hello, and thank you for the warm welcome. Sorry, I focused on translating what I wanted to convey and forgot to greet.

1. I moved the lrcat file as described in Adobe documentation, I opened in LRC MacOS with no problem, the problem was remapping catalog folders to the network folder, always receiving a not descriptible error (just error opening).
2. I tried update location folder pressing options over the root folder with no luck (we use Spanish version, maybe the label of the option is different)
3. I can use my NAS folder thru Finder, thru Terminal.app, with no problems at all.

4. Lightroom sees (just see) the NAS perfectly.

Best Regards

Report · Jun 04, 2024

Maybe Lightroom Classic doesn't have enough access to the NAS. See if this helps so that you can do the relinking of the catalog to the image files.

Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security. Click on Full Disk Access in the list. Turn on LrC for full disk access. If Adobe Lightroom Classic is not in the list of programs, click on the + sign at the bottom to add it. Reboot the Mac.

Report · May 24, 2024

You just need to reconnect the top level folder to the new location after copying over the lrcat file and everything should fall into place. If you have multiple folders in the sidebar on the NAS, you simply right click (or control click if you didn't enable the right click which you should really do) on one of the folders and select that you want to see the higher level folder. Then just reconnect that folder to the location on the NAS. It is by far the best to use smb filesharing on Macs. AFP is deprecated by Apple and will likely disappear soon. File share mounting on Macs is really backwards and by far not as well done as on windows. It is very fickle and often disconnects without warning. You also have to do a few settings changes in the settings files to make it perform well if you have a gigiabit or higher speed network. Apple really has not done a good job there but there is no reason why you can't make it work just fine. I use my synology NAS between mac and windows machines just fine for raw file storage.

Report · May 26, 2024

AFP is deprecated but for me works better than SMB 3.0, SMB 3.0 is so slow. I had to turn off signing to try if goes better, and continues working so slow compared to AFP. I didnt found AFP plans from Apple, but for now SMB is not an option. I didnt have any disconnection from 6 days ago till now. Can you share SMB settings on your NAS? maybe there's something Im missing. I have a QNAP server but i think that has to be similar to Synology on SMB settings.