Tried to open photos library from a network drive. Now giant iCloud Photos.zip in trash

My photos library is over 500 gigabytes... Apple is all about wireless everything, why don't they make this work. Oh well. I'm just giving up on Photos then. I'll just keep a huge folder of photos like the old days. I'm using Google Photos as my main storage because of it's better interoperability and search-ability anyway. I'll just restore my library that they tossed and do it the old fashioned way. This used to work just fine with iPhoto.

My server is a Mac mini, so there is no problem with file system or anything. I am not asking for amazing performance... just that a program that is supposed to store photos not throw them away, and eventually accomplish what it is supposed to do. I don't think that is too much to ask.

I am a software architect myself with 25 years of experience. I am embarrassed for the engineers on the Photos team. They should seriously be ashamed of themselves. I could never live with myself if my program went so wrong without working tirelessly to make sure something like that could never happen again. I can't even imagine the depravity of software that is supposed to protect files that instead throws them away. At least they could pop up an error like "Sorry you can't have a photo library on a network share" or at least "Sorry an error occurred" and leave the files alone. Honestly... I think this is a rethink your life's choices kind of huge fail. They shouldn't have to rely on you kindly folks to try to cover for their failure. They should come here, apologize, and put some minor amount of effort into it. It is not like we don't pay a premium price for their stuff. I don't expect them to do that, but I would and have.

The photo library in the trash seems to have not been related. It seems to be just gone. All 500+ GB. Library was empty and needed to restored from backup. I believe the backup was not completely up to date, so I am going to have to hope that my Google Photos copy is more stable than what is in my local Apple Photos copy.

There is nothing slim or fast about their database, if their app performance is indicative ;-). They should opt for more stable at this point. I didn't suggest that I ever had photos open in multiple places at the same time. I was trying to use it from one system. It is not compatible with photos on my iMac since Apple has upgraded their file format several times, and the iMac knows nothing about its location. Maybe Apple has built in some library discovery stuff which caused contention? I think this improbable but possible. I would say they should have a check built into their code to prevent it being open in multiple places if it truly was a single user database, but I don't think it is.

The database for a photo library is super small comparitively. Personally I would fully cache it in RAM during use and stream changes to disk. That should have prevented any inconsistencies in the disk copy. This seems a clear choice if it really is a single user database. I expect odds are it isn't a single use database, and there is some face processing daemon or something asynchronously accessing it as well... maybe causing the issues. Regardless, I expect my problem is probably not due to a performance decision as you suggest, just poor design.

The database questions are really moot. Regardless of database design the managed media file data should not have been lost if this system was designed properly. Maybe the database would be corrupted at very worst and need to be rebuilt.... Still the media files should be intact and present. The software must be badly designed... period.

I will create a bug report. My system version is a MacBook Pro, OS X 12.5 on an M1.

All I expect is an error message then and leaving it alone. The excuse that the configuration is unsupported is really lame if you can't even be bothered to check for something your software is providing (file sharing).