DigiKam keeps messing up Network Share Albumb

Help
1

I have a lot of photos on a Synology NAS and they do start getting scanned correctly from my PC and also my Laptop and placed in the album “Photos”. However after a while the root “Photos” album turns to a “red square with white X” icon and I find that in the settings there is a second network share listed, also called Photos but with no network path associated. If I delete this, or delete my original and reconfigure this new entry, it all works again… for a while!

Any ideas how to fix this?

2

@mattbeard:

First, welcome to the KDE Discuss Forum.

Is your instance of digiKam being executed on a Linux system or, something else?

Did you follow these digiKam instructions? → <Import from Remote Computer>

3

Hi,

I have tried this on Windows and MacOS, but not Linux.

I don’t want to import the files from my network storage (11TB) to my Laptop (500GB), this is why I bought a NAS.

Am I misunderstanding the purpose of “Collections on Network Shares”?

4

Hi @mattbeard,
The red X usually means digiKam lost connection to the network share. This can happen sometimes where the NAS disconnects, or at least Windows thinks it did, which is common when the connection to the NAS gets overloaded.

The response time from the NAS gets so slow that Windows or digiKam times out waiting for a response from the NAS, and then will mark it unavailable. Sometime later the NAS becomes “available” again, and so things start to work normally. I’ve seen this on my Mac many times using OpenMediaVault as my NAS when I’m doing large bulk operations.

You might want to look at your NAS settings on both the NAS and Windows/MacOS to see if you can tune the timeout setting so it doesn’t see the NAS as disconnected. That’s what I had to do to fix it for me.

Cheers,
Mike

5

In other words, one should be looking at NAS devices with at least SSD M.2 NVMe storage –
<The Best M.2 SSD NAS You Can Buy right now>

  • And, with at least a 1 Gib/s Ethernet interface – you could try a 5 GHz WLAN interface but, the Ethernet interface is possibly the better way to go …
6

Sorry to say this, but such comments are really not helpful. People do not usually have unlimited money to throw at a problem (like, buying 11 TB of SSD storage).

We should rather focus on how to troubleshoot the problem in their current setup.

1 Like
7

@mlincett:

There are certain items in computing which demand the appropriate hardware – and, network latency is one of them.

A common current point of view is, that you’ll have to invest in the appropriate hardware to support your expectations.

  • With the reasoning that, modern operating systems tend to setup their networking parameters automagically when connecting to a network – it’s no longer advisable to meddle and fiddle about with networking parameters.

Despite all that, yes, yes, you can (still) adjust a few networking parameters to take account of the latencies introduced by slow hardware but –

  • With Microsoft Windows, you’ll have to change a Registry parameter – System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
  • With macOS – it’s a BSD UNIX® – Apple doesn’t seem to have made anything public …
  • With Linux, you can modify the TCP keep-alive timeout parameter with an administrator’s system control command.