LAN drive support in PSE 2018

Report · Sep 19, 2018

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

Report · Sep 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 Cust...

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

Report · Sep 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.

Report · Sep 20, 2018

xplorer1 wrote

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?

Let's be clear:

- I am just another user like you, except that I have been following this forum and the feedback one for years and that I am specifically reading catalog related questions. I have strictly no inside info about the technical aspects of your issue. I also do know that no one at Adobe is at liberty to publicly comment on certain issues on account of the rules of firms in the stock exchange. For instance, I consider the comment given by Chris Cox in the feedback forum are the best info you can get officially. Don't expect members of the support team to tell you more.

- On the other hand, before answering your question, I wondered if it was worth the trouble. There are so few discussions in this forum about LANs that I am pretty sure you won't get any answer from people mastering the use of LANs. That's the nature of this forum. People happy with their solution won't browse the forum regularly to give help. They come because they have issues. So, I thought that what I could do was only to search the forum for you to gather some information.

Now, a user to user forum is the place to discuss such matters and examining different points of view. Here is mine.

I don't believe at all with the future of NASs with Elements as you would like. That's good for IT people wanting to manage their home computers like at the office. The trouble is that in most homes, it's increasingly difficult to be the boss with one's mates and children. For them sharing means freedom and Internet. Good luck. So, the other need may be safety, but today, it's much safer and cheaper to:

- store your photo library AND catalogs on external USB drives (several ones on different locations)

- plug in your external drive alternatively to your desktop or laptop and work immediately.

So while a NAS is an adequate media for backups, the demand will soon be marginal in the case of Elements.

However I don't see any technical issue in storing the media files on a LAN today and I very much doubt there has been something new with the latest PSE versions, at least for catalogs. From the tone of your question, I imagine you have a serious doubt about the notion of 'support'. I hope like you that other users with NASs will bring their experience here. For me, if supports means you can store your files on a NAS, then you can. If support means you'll get help from the Adobe support team when you have technical issues, it's NO. By the way can you find recent 'release notes' for Elements?

Report · Oct 28, 2018

I fully support xplorer1's expectations that PSE should support libraries of media on network drives (eg NASs). It is impractical for my wife and I to share a common photo library by swapping USB drives from one computer to another. To begin with, I tried having the media on mirrored drives (for reliability) on one of our desktops, but Windows PCs (particularly 5-or-more years back) were/are not that reliable and there were too many times that PC was down - meaning the media was unavailable.

Having files on a shared NAS just makes sense for a household, and I cannot see how this demand "will soon be marginal".

We are currently still running PSE11 with media on a NAS, however, one the performance of one desktop is notably slower than the other (despite it being the faster machine). I am looking to upgrade my PSE, and am investigating whether NAS support has been improved - maybe not??

Report · Oct 29, 2018

steerage250 wrote
We are currently still running PSE11 with media on a NAS, however, one the performance of one desktop is notably slower than the other (despite it being the faster machine). I am looking to upgrade my PSE, and am investigating whether NAS support has been improved - maybe not??

Thanks for sharing your experience, steerage250.

I am sorry I have nothing new to answer your question about NAS support beeing improved in the current or future versions of Elements. However, I have questions for you which may be interesting for NAS users.

1 - From what you say, it appears that you can share your library on a NAS; it does work with PSE11, but no so good (slower?) with the most powerful computer. So can we say that storing the library on a NAS does work, but without support (help) from Adobe staff? If so, what improvement are you expecting? Speed? Reliability?

2 - My guess is that you don't use the organizer, or that you don't share catalogs on a NAS? As far as I know that is not possible. As I see it, sharing both the catalog and the library is what is expected by home users of a NAS like you?

3 - It's possible to download and install the free 30 days Elements 2019 trial version to test if you can see a difference. The requirement is that both your computers be 64 bits.

Report · Oct 29, 2018

Yes, both the catalogue and the media files live on the NAS. Our primary interface is the organiser, and we make extensive use of tagging. We never try to have 2 copies of PSE11 running at the same time, but one at a time works.

Both computers spend a fair bit of time (sometimes seemingly randomly) with the little "wheel" spinning in the bottom left corner. Adding new photos into the catalogue can be particularly time consuming as Elements does things like visual similarity hunting and other stuff I'm probably not aware of. However, it does finish eventually (might take a minute-or-so). Sometimes the (recently replaced) old 32 bit machine would just spin forever until my wife got impatient and killed and re-started Elements. That machine has just been replaced with another 64 bit machine in the last week, with not enough experience to comment on its performance (but seemingly no worse than the older 64 bit machine).

I was hoping the time spent waiting for the little wheel to stop spinning might be shorter with the latest Elements.

I had thought about the trial, but there's sort of "no going back" once you've started adding new photos into the latest catalogue (other than reverting to a saved old catalogue and re-doing all the changes back into PSE11). I was more thinking of just biting the bullet and doing it and hoping for the best - but maybe I should do the trial as a test (a bit more conservative).

Report · Nov 04, 2018

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).

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!

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)

It certainly looks workable for us (just have to convince my wife why we should spend the money 🙂

Report · Nov 04, 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.

Report · Nov 04, 2018

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 🙂