Microsoft Photos doesnt find all pictures over a network share

Question

For some years I had around 200GB of photos on an external hard drive and the photos app also didn't had any problems finding all of the photos.
But after some time I wanted to copy my photos to a NAS system because of the redudancy. I just copied the same folder structure over to the NAS and put the NAS location as a source location in the photos app. But the photos app only shows a fraction of my photos most of them are missing even tho there are clearly on the NAS. I can also browse manuelly to them and open them with the photos app. I also waited for a few days but the photos app never found more photos.
Nothing of that helped. If I browse in the photos app to a location with pictures I only get the message "No readable photos, videos or folders found"
Is there maybe a specific setting I need to take in the NAS system? For now it's normally mapped and can be accessed. I found an article that claims that the subfolders should only contain up to 200 images, is this true? And if so why does this only matter for sources from a network? From my external disk it worked fine.
I'm using Windows 10 Home Build 19044.1706

Answer 1

This seems to be a very common problem and people have found a variety of solutions. What worked for me was ensuring that the network location where the photos were stored was indexed by the Windows Search service. If you have them on a Windows Server the client will utilize the server's index. You need to add the 'Windows Search Service' feature and then add the path where your photos are on the server to the index. Also double check that the Windows Search service is set to auto start. If you have the files on a non-Windows server you can make the client index the files. To do this first add a network location in Windows Explorer with the UNC path of your photos. Once that is done add that path to the index on the client. As soon as one of these are completed the pictures should show up in the Photos app. For me this solved both the new Windows 11 Photos app, the Photos Legacy app and the Windows Explorer Gallery folder. Previously if I examined the Gallery Collections property the system said that the network location was not supported due to the fact that it was not indexed. That warning also went away once the files were indexed. I did a Refresh from the ellipses menu in the Photos app and it started adding the photos. This might not be necessary. Hope this can help someone :-)