Network drives

The Ente Photos desktop app currently does not support NAS (network drives).

The app will actually work, and in some cases it will work fine too, but in practice we have found that network storage products sometimes have flaky file system emulation that causes bad performance during uploads, or when trying to directly stream chunks of Google Takeout zips that are stored on network drives.

In particular, the folder watch functionality suffers a lot since the app needs access to file system events to detect changes to the users files so that they can be uploaded whenever there are changes.

Since are high chances of the user having a subpar experience, we request customers to avoid using the desktop app directly with network attached storage and instead temporarily copy the files to their local storage for uploads, and avoid watching folders that live on a network drive.