Microsoft Photos cannot read photos on connected NAS

Question

I have a photos folder on a connected Asustor NAS (running v3.7x of the ADM) and have successfully mapped the drive (\10.x.x.xx\photos) to my computer using SMB (CIFS/SAMBA). These files are mostly jpg, png, and bmp with RAW and TIFF thrown in. I can access that folder with no issues through File Explorer. Using File Explorer, when I click on a photo in the NAS connected drive it opens in MS Photos. So far, so good. But that instance of Photos doesn't seem to be the same one as when I open the MS Photos app, because none of the header controls are there (Collection/Albums/People/Folders).

I opened the MS Photos app, added the NAS drive through "Folder/Add a folder", and the program proceeded to find files, but every photo indexed popped up with an error that it was unreadable. I figured it was just the partial loading of all the data and that the program would resolve this issue, but after the program appeared to complete the "import", the drive was there but I get the error that, "no readable photos, videos, or folders found"

How do I correct this problem. Seems that if I don't use MS Photos to find the photos, then I can view them, but if I try to us MS Photos to open the pictures from the NAS drive, I get an error.

Answer 1

Add a share to your nas using "LIBRARIES". It's hidden inside windows explorer. Do a search on how to enable windows 10 libraries, its hidden, involved and complicated to activate it. Make sure you add the share to the "PICTURES" library folder. Give it a while to index all the network files and then watch as your share magically gets added to microsoft photos by itself, and is automatically updated already even before you open photos. Don't add folders inside microsoft photos, it's slow, klunky and dosn't work right. That picture folder inside libraries is hella powerful, it indexes all your photos across all networks and folders local and on the network by itself using windows search indexing in the background all the time. Your files pop up instantly with almost no lag at all, as if they are on a local ssd drive. It just takes a while to build the index in the beginning, but after that its quick and you wont have any issues. Im pretty sure it just builds a thumbnail cache of your network images onto your local c drive, it doesnt copy all of your files to the local machine/C drive. But deleting them, im getting diffrent results and i think it has to do with owner attributes/read only flags on the files, and im not digging into that because thats another puzzle I'm not in a rush to solve.

Answer 2

Hi GeorgeGraves-0285,

Thank you for your question.

As the problem occurs in MS Photos inside Windows 11, I recommend that you create a topic on the windows 11 forum, because as it was released yesterday, this could be a temporary bug for this application.

To create this topic, access the link below and click on the top option called "Ask a question" and describe the entire problem, including images:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum?sort=LastReplyDate&dir=Desc&tab=All&status=all&mod=&modAge=&advFil=&postedAfter=&postedBefore=&threadType=All&isFilterExpanded=false&page=1

---

If the answer is helpful, please vote positively and accept as an answer.