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Connection status and cached browsing

Remote SMB, WebDAV and S3 mount folders show an unavailable badge when an access check fails. Inside the mount or a descendant folder, an orange banner explains the failure and offers Check again. Indexed folders, cached thumbnails and available previews remain browsable. Notes are stored in Photoly and remain available independently of the remote file.

Connection checks run from the Photoly server, not from the browser. A phone outside your home network can still use a NAS that the Photoly server can reach. Conversely, a browser connected to Wi-Fi does not make a NAS accessible to a Photoly server without a route to it.

Checks distinguish connection failures, authentication or permission failures, invalid configuration and disabled sources. A single missing file does not mark the entire source disconnected. Scan errors remain separate: an unsupported or corrupt image does not imply a network failure. The viewer reports storage/file access failures instead of a generic EXIF error; a photo without EXIF is normal.

The root checks visible remote mounts; a remote folder checks its own source. Checks refresh every 30 seconds while the page is visible, resume when it becomes visible, and have a five-second server deadline. Concurrent checks for the same configuration share one request. Check again bypasses the cached result. Configuration changes invalidate the cache. Actual remote fetches can update status, but loading a cached file does not prove the source has reconnected.

Health checks are read-only:

  • SMB/WebDAV query the configured root directory.
  • S3 checks an existing original object's metadata; an empty source uses a bucket HEAD. Permissions for bucket metadata can differ from permissions for individual objects, so an access-denied result on an empty source should be checked against its IAM policy.
  • The checks never call the existing write-test routine or create/delete probe files.

If the banner persists, check the source address, server-side network/VPN/DNS/TLS, credentials and root/share/bucket permissions. A configured host that is not allowed by Photoly's storage allowlist is a configuration problem. Disconnecting storage does not bypass normal authorization or make failed file writes succeed.

If the browser itself cannot reach Photoly, the UI reports an application connection error, not a NAS outage. Source APIs accept only account-owned source IDs and never expose credentials, internal paths or raw protocol errors. Health state is ephemeral and is rechecked after a server restart. In a multi-process deployment, each process maintains its own short-lived cache.