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I migrated my photo library to an Asustor NAS and now I can’t see photos from Nitro for iPad or iPhone. My photo library is exported from Lightroom, so the folder structure is Y/Y-M-D. Photos are stored in a Photos folder within the Public folder in my NAS. I’m running iPadOS/iOS 26.4 on an M4 iPad Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Even after selecting Show Subfolder Contents, I can navigate to a folder containing photos and nothing shows up. Nitro for Mac works perfectly. I’ve tried clearing the cache, deleting and re-installing. I’m aware of the weirdness with the Files app and shared drives, but deleting and re-adding the SMB drives doesn’t seem to fix anything. I’m stumped.
I had the same idea and after struggling to make it work, I did more (some) research and discovered that according to Apple you shouldn’t store Photos library on a NAS. It needs to be on a direct (not networked) attached drive/locally mounted volume. There is a complex workaround using a sparse image and APFS, and the instructions are available through a web search.(not sure I can link here). I tried it on my uGreen NAS but it seemed too risky and complicated so I changed back to using a directly attached RAID.
A Photos Library on a network share is not supported by Apple, as far as I know. However, if you simply want to browse the images stored in folders, that would be different.
Not all NAS work with Nitro on iOS (Mac seems to be fine in general) – I have tested Synology (which worked) and UGreen (which did not work). The basic symptom is that the app can see the folders, but the contents are reported by the OS as empty. As far as I can tell, this is either a configuration issue or bug in the NAS (since some NAS work fine).
To be clear, I’m not trying to relocate my Apple Photos library to the NAS. That would be a nightmare. These are just my Lightroom photos. I’ll try tinkering with SMB settings and logging and see if I can find anything. Is there logging in Nitro which could be helpful?
There isn’t any logging, unfortunately. The app asks iOS for the contents of the directory, and it returns an empty list (zero items). There is no error, so the app cannot differentiate this from a folder that is actually empty.
I emailed the Gentleman Coders support email the content of my diagnostics file, as well as an AI analysis of the file. It does appear to be an SMB issue, but other apps on my iPad are able to see the photos on my NAS share after I disconnect and re-connect the shared folder.
Thanks for sending that. I wrote back to you on email. Some apps work on individual files, while others work with directories (and sub-directories). Apps that work with individual files are not affected by this problem because iOS provides the path to the file correctly. It’s the apps (like Nitro) that enumerate directories that have this issue. If you have Photomator, it has a similar ability to work with directories. Is it able to see all of the files inside and also tell when files are added and removed from the directory? When I tried Photomator in the past with a UGreen NAS (which also doesn’t work with Nitro), Photomator has the same problem – pointing to a bug below the app-level.
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