stalled import from MacOS Photos to Synology NAS

[gonewest818]

Yesterday I installed Lightroom Classic CC (v7.4) as a trial on a 2014 Macbook Pro running High Sierra.

As a test I'm importing about 1300 images (mostly JPG, some PNG, no raw) and about 50 Quicktime movies. Total size of the import is about 14GB. All from Apple's Photos and going to a Synology NAS.  Ultimate goal is to import a much larger (20 times larger) set of photos, but I thought it wise to take a few baby steps before attempting that.

In particular what I did to perform the import is:

1. use Lightroom Classic to create a folder on the remote NAS
2. perform a test - copy 5 photos (already imported in Lightroom) from the local drive to the remote folder to make sure LR can write to the remote folder (yes, it worked, so I more confident about continuing)
3. In the Finder, right click the "Photos Library" and "Show Package Contents"
4. find the "Masters" folder inside the package, and drag that folder onto Lightroom Classic (which opens the Import dialog)
5. Make sure the "Import" settings are set to use the remote folder as the destination.
6. Start the import as a "Copy" without conversion to DNG.

And here's what happened.

1. For about an hour the import made slow but steady progress. The progress bar at top left was moving, and the Catalog statistics for "All Photographs" and "Current Import" were increasing.
2. After about 90 minutes elapsed the import stopped making further progress. The "All Photographs" count was 1086, and "Current Import" was 291. The MacOS Activity Meter showed Lightroom consuming 100% CPU.
3. Now over two hours elapsed and the progress bar hasn't advanced at all. The "All Photographs" count is still 1086 and "Current Import" still 291. Activity Meter still showing Lightroom consuming 100% CPU.
4. Checking the admin interface on the NAS, and I can see it's idle.  No inbound traffic coming from Lightroom or anywhere else. No outbound traffic either (because I've paused all folder syncing to the cloud), and minimal CPU activity.
5. I spot checked the 1000 or so photos that have imported and everything appears intact. However I noticed none of the PNG files in the Photos library were transferred. Which is confusing because I thought PNG was a supported format, and anyway there is no alert or warning (yet) from Lightroom saying some of the files could not be imported.

So while I sit and wait to see what happens, I searched these forums and found lots of general "slow import" questions but no concrete answers.

So I'll try some other specific questions:

1. Is it typical for imports to "stall" for long periods of time like this?
2. Is there any way to get more detailed information (like a logfile or something) that says what Lightroom is doing right now?  It's hogging 100% CPU so presumably there's some legitimate reason.  Is it making smart previews? Is it doing Catalog management?
3. Is there some other workflow that would be faster ... for instance can I just copy the "Master" to the NAS using the Finder, and then somehow import the images into the Catalog without physically moving them over the network?
4. Is there a FAQ for all of this? I haven't found one anywhere.

Thanks everyone-

[Just Shoot Me]

There is a problem with NAS boxes across a network and using the Apple network protocol, AFP. Switch both the NAS and your Mac to use SMB.

[gonewest818]

Interesting, but that's not the issue. This volume is definitely mounted with SMB:

$ mount  | grep photo

//xxxxx@yyyyy._smb._tcp.local/photo on /Volumes/photo (smbfs, nodev, nosuid, mounted by xxxxx)

[gonewest818]

4 hours elapsed.

Lightroom is still consuming 100% CPU. No signs of any further progress in terms of photos imported, and no indication what Lightroom has been doing for the past four hours.  Is there ANY reasonable justification why it would take 4 hours to import only 1000 photos? I can't think of a good reason.

[Bob Somrak]

gonewest818  wrote

1. In the Finder, right click the "Photos Library" and "Show Package Contents"
2. find the "Masters" folder inside the package, and drag that folder onto Lightroom Classic (which opens the Import dialog)

I might be wrong but I don't think Lightroom will import from a PHOTOS "Package" like you are trying to do.   You need to move/copy these files using the OS to the HD or NAS first.

[gonewest818]

Possibly, but I'm doubtful that was the problem.  As far as I know a package is nothing more than a directory with a particular name and/or file structure that causes the Mac to display it in a special way. If you navigate into the package from the command line, you can see there's nothing all that special about a package at all. By showing the package contents, I was able to click and drag the "Masters" folder that lives inside the package. I believe when all is said and done that folder is just a folder.

In any event, if dragging files from inside a package were a problem, I would expect none of the images to have imported at all. Instead, it seems to have imported about 1000 out of 1300 images.

[gonewest818]

I finally gave up and quit Lightroom.  It complained about a running import task that hadn't completed, but I quit anyway.  Upon restart the catalog contains slightly over 1000 images, and 900+ of those in the more recent import.  Again, not everything I expected to import but more than zero.

It seems as if Lightroom got stuck in a state where the process was frantically waiting for a signal that the import task was done, except the import was *already* done, so the signal never came.  That doesn't explain why some images were never imported, though.

Anyway, as Bob said above, I will try copying the files by hand first and then importing from the NAS to see if it fares better.

Adobe employees - you have a bug in the importer code. Even if you claim not to support importing from a Photos package to a NAS, you should properly detect that case and exit.  You should never allow the app to get stuck waiting for an event or signal like I believe it did.

[Tony_See]

Does your NAS go into a sleep mode perhaps during a long process?

I have had similar issues with a LaCie NAS I use, but its difficult to diagnose the actual issue as the NAS OS is somewhat hidden.

[gonewest818]

In theory it's possible the drives can hibernate but the setting is for 20 minutes with zero activity. In practice the system sits on my desk next to my laptop, and anecdotally I would say I have never seen the NAS go into hibernation. I think because there's always some kind of client activity or internal management tasks like search indexing that keep the drives active. I've just enabled logging on the Synology to capture events related to hibernation.

[gonewest818]

I removed the remote folder from my Lightroom Catalog without deleting the files, and then re-imported the same folders into Lightroom again.  The import took only minutes, and (really interesting!) afterward there were 1311 photos imported whereas the previous attempt succeeded in importing only about 1000.  For exactly the same folders.

So based on all this I am guessing there are two decoupled processes going on during the import.  One process is for copying/moving/renaming files, and the other process is for adding new files to the catalog. And I think there is a bug somewhere in the code where the assumption is made that file copies are local and therefore very fast, and this results in files missing from the catalog, and the import therefore never completing.

Conclusion is that I'll do a larger test by copying the files first to the NAS, then import those files from the NAS (as Bob suggested above, albeit not exactly for the reason he suggested).

[picbod]

Hi, have you had any luck figuring out what happened with your stalled import?

I have a similar problem which involves a 90 minute hang during data transfer from a NAS to a LR catalogue which always ends with the the NAS unmounting.

The photo archive on the NAS contains about 850,000 photos totalling 22 TB, represented with 2 LR catalogues on a 2TB SSD attached to my MacbookPro as well as the current catalogue on my internal Mac SSD.

For weeks I have been trying to build previews and smart previews to the SSD from the Synology NAS, typically setting it to run in the late evening, but despite LR showing max CPU use, the preview update always fails to complete and the Network log always shows the volume unmounted 90 minutes after the start of the preview building.

I cannot find any setting in the DSM that times the volume mount out after 90 minutes.

I have just updated to MacOS 10.14.6, which includes an SMB stability update but it did not improve this issue – though it does appear to have improved the problem with not being able to save over files on the NAS if they were selected in the Finder or LR.

I am beginning to think it is a limitation in Lightroom.

Any thoughts anyone?