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I don;t know what to expect but I was previously using windows 10 media services and didn’t have a problem. I have 122 thousand photos in 838 folders. Is this a problem for plex?
PMS can handle this but on a Synology NAS, unless it’s one of the xeon models, you will be dealing with the “less than speedy” processors. Those which have the J3455 CPU (DS918 etc) have about 2700 Passmarks of performance. The typical i7-7700 has 10,000 Passmarks of performance.
It is possible to mitigate this by adding photo folders in smaller groups.
Since PMS does not have a limit on the number of folders which may be added to a section, if you can add photos in groups of about 5000 at a time, waiting for each group to finish, you’ll have a much better experience overall.
Does this help ?
I previously had the photo library on an old amd quad core windows 10 pc. I know the synology processor is still a little slower than the amd but windows media server usually started serving these photos after an hour or so. Looks like pms is going to need a few days just to build the photo library. Not sure how it will maintain it since it’s in a lot of folders. Plus I have some video I’d like to add as well. I do appreciate you getting back to me but the pms code doesn’t seem very efficient? Is there a way I can turn off all this logging? It looks like it’s writing about 10 lines to the log for every picture it processes? Maybe that would help. I guess since building the library is theoretically a one time deal investing in making it faster is not low hanging fruit.
PMS is pretty good. It’s the Synology Atom and Celeron CPU’s which aren’t up to the CPU load.
I tried other media servers on the same system and had similar results.
With all PMS does (the thumbnail generation takes a lot of CPU), it will take time.
Given you are adding photos, every single file is needs a thumbnail from the start.
I’m going to let it chew through it all and see what the results are.
What would you recommend for maintaining this library? The structure is a top folder for the year and then a folder for each event or trip that we have photos for during the year. I know there can be issues monitoring a lot of folders for changes and I would like to avoid rescanning the whole library when we add stuff. The periodic choice is at most a day and I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I don’t see a choice to pick the time for that anyway.
Once everything is indexed, structure and build sequence won’t matter.
It’s only this initial loadup which is the burden on the CPU.
Later, as you add photos (up to a few hundred) only those will be processed. The others will already be done.
The top level is up to you. My recommendation of breaking into groups, no more than about 5000 photos each, is where to focus.
Remember, PMS doesn’t care how many subfolders are listed.
As an additional point, once you have all the subfolders added, you can then have PMS restructure its references:
- ADD the top most folder name to the library folder list
- Let PMS scan.
- Each photo will be tagged as a duplicate. No additional work performed. This is expected and desired.
- When all scanning is complete and all are marked with 2 (duplicate),
- Remove the individuals, leaving only the top most.
- It will scan again. Duplicate flag removed.
- When done: Empty Trash, Clean Bundles, and Optimize database.
That sounds reasonable.
I’ll have about 850 folders when I’m done. How would you set things for ongoing? Is it ok to watch that many folders for changes?
By default, Linux allows 8192 directories to be monitored for changes.
Increasing that value is very easy.
Synology does it a little bit differently but it’s well documented at this point (until they change it again 
)
Sounds good! Thanks for all the help. I’m working on the photos. I’ve got some home video too but just around a hundred so that shouldn’t be a problem.
Regarding the 8192; it’s the total number of directories monitored across all your libraries. If you use 4000 here, 3000 there, you’ll have about 1150 left over to use. The transcoder does need some to operate (audio codec processing)
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