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xplorer1
Participant
September 19, 2018
Question

LAN drive support in PSE 2018

  • September 19, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 1829 views

When I upgraded to PSE 14 I found that support of LAN drives (e.g. WD Book) had disappeared. As I keep all my 17,000 photos on one, this was a bit of a pain. I ended up emailing Adobe's director of customer experience, who put me in touch with the right techies. First they suggested I put all my photos on my hard drive, then they denied that LAN drive support was ever there: I showed them the release notes that documented it. Eventually (7 months) they took it on board and fixed it in PSE 15.

I'm now looking at upgrading again, to PSE 2018 or whatever the latest release is, and and am looking for someone to confirm that LAN drive support is present. Anyone using a LAN drive successfully (or not)?

Thanks...Neil

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1 reply

MichelBParis
MichelBParis
Legend
September 19, 2018

I showed them the release notes that documented it.

Interesting.

Could you be more precise about the dates of those release notes?

Edit1:

The last time I saw a semi-official answer was in the feedback forum:

Elements 13: Can Organizer be used with a Synology Network Attached Storage? | Photoshop Family Customer Community

Edit 2:

This other old discussion may be useful to understand issues with the catalog and NAS.

Using SQL to change NAS path in PSE 6

Also have a look at the link to John R Ellis explanation.

Edit 3:

Network drives

X
xplorer1Author
Participant
September 20, 2018

Michael, here's an extract from an email to Adobe tech support from April '16. As you can probably tell, I was getting pretty tetchy at the time! You should be able to follow the hyperlink to the Release Notes. Do you have an answer to my original question?

"Dear Piyush, thank you for your reply.

You ask me to let you know if I "have further doubts in this regards". I do, with regards to both the substance and tone of what you say.

Firstly, you tell me something that I - and many others to judge from the volume of debate on your own and other forums about this issue - have used for many years "may or may not work", and that the network drive "might not have enough permission of read and write". Frankly I find this an unacceptably unprofessional response. Adobe writes, maintains and sells this product. Surely its technical staff KNOW what it's capable of, and what read and write permissions would be necessary. I feel as if you're trying to brush me off.

Secondly, I've read the manuals available on the Adobe website:

Adobe's release notes for PSE10 state:

“Network support: You can access photos from network drives if they are mapped to a drive letter or if you use a valid share name. However, Photoshop Elements cannot store any of its working files on network drives.”

So keeping photos on network drives IS supported. There's no mention of withdrawal of this functionality in the 11, 12 and 13 release notes. 14 release notes can’t be found, but PSE14 FAQ state:

What features from previous versions are not available in Photoshop Elements 14?

A handful of features from previous versions are not available in Photoshop Elements 14 due to new product support for 64-bit systems. They include:

  • Photo Mail
  • Photomerge Style Match
  • Magic Extractor tool
  • Texture Fill
  • Frame from video
  • Interactive layout mode in Photomerge Panorama
  • Photoshop Showcase
 

There's no mention in the above list of network drive support being removed. And the Editor works perfectly well with pictures on my network drive. If the Editor can, why can the Organiser no longer do so?

With regard to the tone of your reply, you dismissively tell me "The solution is simple which to move the photo library to the Hard drive physically present on the computer"

Your "solution" is neither simple nor suitable for my use of PSE. I keep the photos on a network drive for the very simple reason that it allows other household members to access them as well, regardless of my laptop being powered on or home network-connected. I have also - as I have told you repeatedly - just moved to a (very expensive) new laptop with a 256GB solid state drive. The remaining free space on it would be largely consumed by my photo library, so I need network drive support in Organiser to work again.

Please refer this back to your management for comment.

S
steerage250
Known Participant
November 5, 2018

steerage250  wrote

OK, latest update.  I installed the trial version of Elements 2019, and have both the catalog and media on my NAS - and it's working (slow, but not much different to Elements 11 - but I can't compare it's speed to a local disk-based installation anyway).

What you can test temporarily is to create a copy of your catalog folder and put it on your main computer from the explorer. Theroretically, this should make the catalog faster.

The conversion of the catalog from 11 to 2019 was a bit slow and weird.  It took over 24 hours, and it sat at 28% complete for nearly all of that time - then suddenly it was done!

Same as above.

I think it would have been faster if you had started the conversion from a copy of the catalog folder in your main drive, and copied it back after conversion.

At the moment, it is *slowly* working in the background through the 19,000+ photos doing face analysis (what this feature does, I will find-out when it is complete I suppose)

Thanks for the feedback.


yes, I know I could test a local drive catalogue, but it's not relevant to us anyway - and we're used to the somewhat tardy response from a NAS-based catalogue :-)

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