Photos on a network drive

Hi,
I have over 10gb of photos on my Network Hard drive at home. I recently bought my first Macbook.
When I opened iPhoto, I dragged 1 folder to iPhoto and it worked great. Then I realized that my photos were copied from the network drive to my macbook.
Is there a way to keep the photos on the network drive and to have iPhoto read them directly from the network without having to copy them on my macbook? (I want to save space on my macbook)
If not, can this be done if I purchase an external hard drive and plug it via usb/Thunderbolt and put all my photos on it?!
Thank you for your help !

Is there a way to keep the photos on the network drive and to have iPhoto read them directly from the network without having to copy them on my macbook? (I want to save space on my macbook)
Yes but don't. It's unreliable.
For more on iPhoto and file management see this User Tip:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6361
If not, can this be done if I purchase an external hard drive and plug it via usb/Thunderbolt and put all my photos on it?!
Yes.
Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Regards
TD

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Good evening.
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Mr.Landerholm wrote:
But, is it possible to erase the organizer database and start from scratch ?
And import photos from a network drive ?
I suppose it would work: to test it, just create a new catalog from the catalog manager, and test the import of test pictures from the network drive.
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Can't upgrade catalog from Elements 8 -thinks photos are on backup drive...

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Lee Jay wrote:
R Harnwell wrote:
To Lee Jay:
Thanks for that - that certainly agrees with my findings so far.
Do I take it you've had this confirmed by someone from Adobe then? Is it an intended limitation, or just an acknowledged bug?
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Photoshop Elements 8: Watch Folder on Network Drive

I have all my photos on a network drive, I am trying to access via
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Thanks
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I have been using the full network path, but that doesn't appear to be the problem. When I enter the path, it says access is denied. I made
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Lightroom has trouble reading RAW files on my network drive ("The file appears to be unsupported or

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Got RAWs from a D7000 and D600, LR v5.2 [922700].
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Let me clear one thing which I noticed in main query :
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Syncing photos from network drive

all my photos are stored on a network drive and itunes successfully syncs all photos from this drive to my iphone. however, the next time i turn on my computer and re-sync, i see from the photos tab that the location of my photos has been changed to the iphotos library, which i don't use.
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Same results here... I have an Infrant ReadyNAS RAID file server that I bought to be my 'master' vault for all my data. My computers don't store any important data locally. Their "My Documents" shortcuts point to the fileserver.
When I tried to sync Apple TV to the My Pictures folder, iTunes would think for a few seconds and then give me the little exclaimation mark inside the triangle instead of the synching icon, and would go no further.
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Since I don't plan on moving the master copies of my photos off of the fileserver, I am just going to use a batch file to periodically mirror the x:\mypictures folder to c:\appletvsuckspicturemirror. Then I'll just set up Apple TC to go get the photos there instead.
robocopy "x:\my_documents\mypictures" c:\appletvsuckspicturemirror /e
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I have just purchased an iMAC. O/S is Lion. I just cannot access the files in my Microsoft network drive which my macpro snow leopard has no problem. Looks like it is just the Lion O/S has the problem. The file I needed to access are my photo files.

I have an iMAC running Lion cannot access my Microsoft Network drive. It sees it on Finder but said connection failed. By other Macpro Laptop which run Leopard has no problem at all. It lreads and load my photos from the RAID Drive. I am sure some asked the question before but it is new to me. That was the reason I am not upgrading my Macpro to Lion yet. was it a bug in Lion networking area?
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You need to move to Windows 7, because Apple is now releasing a new OS X version annually and it's playing havoc with people's hardware and software.
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I am experiencing the same problem
This is really frustrating! What is the technical difficulty in making this available? This disables all users who use NAS from using Photo Stream.
What a huge oversight.

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There's a strong chance that the problem is the format of the server. Event though the Mac can read and write to FAT formatted drives, there are file name length issues that can really mess up a library or other files.
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Do you Twango?
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I've written an Automator workflow application (requires Tiger), iPhoto dB File Backup, that will copy the selected Library6.iPhoto file from your iPhoto Library folder to the Pictures folder, replacing any previous version of it. It's compatible with iPhoto 08 libraries. You can download it at Toad's Cellar. Be sure to read the Read Me pdf file.

Slow importing photo library from network hard drive

I have about 20GB of photos stored on a network hard drive. I'd like to import them into iPhoto but I don't want to store them locally on my macbook pro as it will take up too much space.
I followed the advice from previous posts and set up my library on the network drive - however the import process is taking way too long. Last night I was able to get about 100 photos in 3 hours. I eventually gave up and stopped the process. I realize that transferring via the wireless network is slowing things down but there has to be a way of doing this that doesn't take several days. I didn't have this problem on my PC using Adobe Photoshop Elements - it was able to import the same number of files from the network drive in less than an hour. I watched iPhoto while it imported a single (small) photo - it took about a minute just to import a file less that 1mb in size.
any sugestions or should I just stick to Windows?
Macbook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8)

I'll try the wired connection tonight - I do have other devices that access photos/mp3's over my wireless network (eg. xbox360) that seem to have no difficulty with speed.
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I am new to mac. Do I need to store photos on the hard drive to use iPhoto or can I store pics on a network drive and still edit with iPhoto?

I am new to mac. Do I need to store photos on the hard drive to use iPhoto or can I store pics on a network drive and still edit with iPhoto?

iPhoto needs to have the Library sitting on disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Users with the Library sitting on disks otherwise formatted regularly report issues including, but not limited to, importing, exporting, saving edits and sharing the photos.
See this article
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS5168
for more. Note also the comment:
“Additionally, storing the iPhoto library on a network rather than locally on your computer can also lead to poor performance or data loss.”

Photos on a network drive

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