[digiKam-users] Switching from workstation internal databases to NAS or Cloud

[Budge]

Real beginner here just starting with digiKam.  I am increasingly needing to work at different site and wish to use my laptop for editing tags and sorting pictures.  

I understand there are suggestions for keeping my databases on a NAS and using MariaDB but many appear to be quite old.
 
Are there any up-to-date instructions on how I can do this using a NAS and is it possible to do this similarly but using cloud storage?  Please could somebody suggest the best links for these instructions.
Budge.

[Chris Green]

Budge <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Real beginner here just starting with digiKam. I am increasingly needing
> to work at different site and wish to use my laptop for editing tags and
> sorting pictures.
>
> I understand there are suggestions for keeping my databases on a NAS and
> using MariaDB but many appear to be quite old.
>  
> Are there any up-to-date instructions on how I can do this using a NAS
> and is it possible to do this similarly but using cloud storage? Please
> could somebody suggest the best links for these instructions.

Unless you keep *all* the picture files as well as the database on
your NAS I don't see the advantage.  In fact I see lots of problems if
the pictures are not on the same system as the database.

If you keep *everything* on the NAS then that'll work OK but it will
be slow, even with Gigabit networking and a fast NAS disk drive.

Cloud storage would be even slower.

I have Digikam running on my (moderately fast, I5) desktop machine
using an SSD.  It runs quite nicely with something like 30k images,
images and database are on the same machine.

To run from my laptop I use x2go (a remote desktop app, like VNC) and
across a fast network that's acceptable.

I.e. my advice would be to keep images and database in one place with
a fast disk drive.  Use a remote desktop to do things from elsewhere.

--
Chris Green
·

[woenx]

I store all my pictures in a NAS, but I keep my database on my local
computer.

It's not super fast, but it's definitely usable. It takes a while to scan
for now pictures on startup, but once it's done, it works quite well.

I think the most important factor is the network latency from your computer
to the NAS, more than the network speed.



--
Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html

[Dusenberg]

I also store all my 'final' images on a Synology NAS via 1Gbe wired connection, and the dk database on my workstation on SSD. No issues with dk performance, and startup scan is so fast I don't notice it.  I also use darktable in a similar manner - images on NAS and db on workstation - and also have no network performance issues.  However, the workstation is a Ryzen 3900 12-core with RX5500XT gpu, and 2 SSDs on which digikam runs 24 threads for its startup scan . . . . 

Before I built the workstation, I used an i5 laptop and that was SLOW on the wired connection and painfully slow/unusable on wifi. I put this down to network speed and NAS speed (2 HDD in RAID0), so had planned to upgrade the NAS to a 4 HDD in RAID10 (stripe of mirrors) with a 2x1Gbe aggregated LAN connection, after the workstation was up and running.  But then I found that the workstation was so fast that the NAS and network upgrades would make only marginal difference to performance so I shelved them.  In my situation raw compute power proved the most important factor.

On 27/01/2021 18:53, woenx wrote:

I store all my pictures in a NAS, but I keep my database on my local
computer.

It's not super fast, but it's definitely usable. It takes a while to scan
for now pictures on startup, but once it's done, it works quite well.

I think the most important factor is the network latency from your computer
to the NAS, more than the network speed.



--
Sent from: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digikam-users-f1735189.html