You spend more time futzing with Promise, Drobo, Synology software and Apple improves their iCloud sharing faster than the third parties do to support new OS, new features, etc.(When new tech arrives, it’s easy to drop one new drive in, expensive to upgrade your entire NAS) buying speed on one drive is always faster than many drives. Local storage tends to become cheaper faster and faster faster than network.Local storage is far easier to back up and understand and maintain.Local storage is an order of magnitude more reliable than NAS.Local storage is an order of magnitude faster than NAS.I strongly recommend local storage over network storage based on years of experience these guidelines are generally true. ✗ Harder to set up - not as simple as just copying your entire libraryĪpple now has a document covering how to do this on the recent macOS versions and iCloud settings. ✗ Does use some space on your local machine ✓ Uses very little space on your local machine ✓ Much less likely to have problems due to network dropouts This means that it uses very little space on your local machine but even if the network drops there is no chance of corruption/etc. This way, you keep the library on your local machine but the media is stored on a network drive.

This alternative is probably better, but requires that you switch to Aperture. Put your library on your local machine and the contents on a network volume.✗ Possibly susceptible to network dropouts causing problems

✓ Easy to set up, just copy your entire library to a network drive and ⌥-launch iPhoto

This works fine for my relatively large Aperture library, but I see no reason for this not to work in iPhoto. This option works fine for me - even when the network drops (which is pretty rare): the data transfer pauses and continues when the network reconnects. This is the option that I went for on my setup, mainly because I did not consider the second option at that point in time.

Put your library and contents on a network volume.

There are two main options which I would go for:

Mac open library on external drive