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How to Cull and Rate Photos on Your Asustor NAS

By Ingo D ·

You bought an Asustor NAS because it hit the right balance of price and features: ADM is genuinely pleasant to use, App Central has a deep catalogue of packages, and models like the Lockerstor and Nimbustor range pack real Intel silicon and 2.5 GbE or 10 GbE networking into a home or small-studio budget. It stores your RAW library reliably and serves it fast over the network. What it does not do is help you cull a shoot.

You get home from a session with 1,200 frames on a card. You need maybe 60 finished images. Your Asustor NAS holds the files perfectly and streams them over SMB without complaint. But ADM’s own Photo Gallery package is built for browsing and light organising, not for a fast keep-or-reject pass with star ratings that your editing software can actually read. So you copy the shoot to a laptop, cull it there, and try to get the ratings back onto the NAS afterwards, usually by hand. The NAS ends up doing half its job: it is a vault, not a culling station.

This guide covers the culling workflow for Asustor NAS owners: connecting over SMB with the real ADM menu names, running a culling session, and getting your star ratings into Lightroom or Capture One without a re-import. Asustor’s ADM operating system has its own paths and terminology, distinct from Synology’s DSM, QNAP’s QTS, or UGREEN’s UGOS, so this walkthrough uses Asustor’s actual settings, not a generic template.

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Asustor Inc. It connects to Asustor NAS devices using the standard SMB protocol, the same way any SMB client does.

What makes an Asustor NAS different for photographers?

Asustor’s operating system, ADM (Asustor Data Master), is built around App Central, a package store that lets you add services like Plex, Docker, or surveillance software on demand rather than having everything pre-installed. For photographers, the entry-level Drivestor series (AS1104T and similar) uses a Realtek processor and is aimed at backup and simple file serving, fine for a smaller library but not built for heavy concurrent access. The step up, the Lockerstor and Nimbustor Gen2 lines (AS6706T, AS5404T and similar), moves to Intel Celeron processors with 2.5 GbE as standard and 10 GbE available on higher models, which is where a working photo library starts to feel genuinely fast over the network.

The Flashstor series is the outlier worth knowing about: it drops spinning drives entirely in favour of all-M.2-NVMe bays, so random access to a folder full of RAW files is close to local-SSD speed even over the network. For a photographer who wants a NAS that behaves like fast local storage, Flashstor closes that gap further than any spinning-disk Asustor model can.

Where every Asustor model falls short is the same place every consumer NAS falls short: the bundled Photo Gallery package is a viewer, not a culling tool. Fast hardware does not fix a missing workflow.

No. Photo Gallery, the first-party ADM package, indexes your library, generates thumbnails, and lets you browse and share albums through a web interface. It has no reject flag, no persistent star-rating system that writes to a format your editor reads, and no full-screen frame-by-frame review mode built for speed. It is designed for looking at photos you have already sorted, not for sorting them.

Culling a shoot properly needs four things in a tight loop: one frame at a time, full-screen, a single gesture or keystroke to decide keep or reject, automatic advance to the next frame, and a metadata write that survives outside the app that made it. Photo Gallery covers none of these. That is the gap a dedicated culling app fills, connecting to the same shared folders over the same SMB protocol your NAS already runs.

How do I connect CullKit to an Asustor NAS over SMB?

Every Asustor NAS running ADM exposes shared folders over SMB by default or with one toggle. Here is the setup using the actual ADM menu names:

  1. Sign in to your Asustor NAS’s ADM web interface with your administrator account.
  2. Open Settings → Services and check that SAMBA (SMB) is enabled. ADM supports SMB2 and SMB3; leave the default settings unless your network requires an older protocol for compatibility.
  3. Open Access Control → Shared Folders and confirm or create the shared folder that holds your photos, for example a folder named Photos or RAW. Set permissions so your user account has read and write access to that folder specifically.
  4. Note your NAS’s IP address under Settings → Network → Network Interface. If it is set to DHCP, reserve a static lease for it in your router so the address does not change after a reboot or power outage.
  5. In CullKit on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, add a new SMB connection. Enter it as smb://<NAS-IP>/<share-name>, for example smb://192.168.1.45/Photos, and sign in with your ADM username and password.
  6. Browse to the folder with your shoot and start culling. CullKit stores the connection credentials securely in your device Keychain, so you only enter them once.

Once connected, CullKit reads your Asustor shared folder exactly as it is laid out on disk. Nothing is copied to a staging location, nothing is uploaded anywhere, and your RAW files never leave the NAS until you decide to move or export them yourself.

What does a culling session look like on an Asustor library?

A session has three phases: start (choose all frames, only unrated frames, or a filtered subset by rating or colour label), rate (the main pass where you go through every image), and batch review (a final look at your keepers before the ratings are written). Most photographers run two passes: a fast first sweep to cut the obvious rejects, then a slower second pass to assign star ratings to what survived.

On iPhone and iPad, the workflow is full-screen and gesture-based: swipe right to keep, swipe left to reject, tap a star to rate one to five. A mode switcher at the bottom lets you toggle between star ratings, a simple pick/reject mode, and colour labels. Each decision auto-advances to the next frame, so there is no tapping back to a grid between images. On Mac, the same session runs from the keyboard: number keys for star ratings, P to pick, X to reject, 0 to clear a rating, and arrow keys to move between frames.

Hardware matters here more than on most consumer NAS platforms because Asustor’s range spans such different chips. On a Drivestor with its Realtek processor, folder scans and thumbnail generation for a large library take noticeably longer, so give the NAS a moment to build previews before you start a fast pass. On a Lockerstor Gen2 or Nimbustor Gen2 with an Intel Celeron and 2.5 GbE or 10 GbE, full-resolution previews load close to instantly over a wired connection. On a Flashstor with all-NVMe storage, the difference is most obvious on large batches: scrubbing through a folder of 3,000 RAW files feels the same whether the files sit on the NAS or on the SSD inside your Mac.

How do my ratings get into Lightroom or Capture One from an Asustor NAS?

Every rating, reject flag, and colour label you set in CullKit is written straight to an XMP sidecar file next to the original RAW on your Asustor share. XMP is the open metadata standard Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, and Darktable all read natively, so there is no proprietary CullKit database standing between your culling session and your editor.

Open your working folder in Lightroom after a session and your picks are already there: five-star keepers show their rating, rejects carry the reject flag. If the folder already exists in your Lightroom catalogue, run Library → Synchronize Folder (or Read Metadata from Files on the selected images) and the new ratings appear immediately, no re-import required. In Capture One, importing the same folder into a session or catalogue reads the same sidecars automatically.

RAW and JPEG pairs from the same frame share one XMP sidecar, matching how Lightroom itself writes metadata, so you are not left with duplicate or conflicting rating files. These sidecars are small, human-readable text files sitting right on the Asustor share alongside your images. Back them up the same way you back up your RAWs, and they travel with the library intact if you ever move to different NAS hardware entirely.

Which Asustor NAS model handles a photo library well?

Every current Asustor model can serve a photo library over SMB, but the culling experience scales with the hardware:

  • Drivestor 4 (AS1104T) - 4-bay, Realtek RTD1296, dual Gigabit Ethernet. Workable for a smaller library under a few terabytes, but the Realtek processor and Gigabit ports show their limits with large folders or multiple simultaneous clients.
  • Nimbustor 4 Gen2 (AS5404T) - 4-bay, Intel Celeron, dual 2.5 GbE. A solid middle ground: enough throughput and CPU headroom that culling feels responsive even with a large RAW archive.
  • Lockerstor 4 Gen2 (AS6704T) - 4-bay, Intel Celeron, 2.5 GbE with 10 GbE upgrade options via an add-in card on some models. Built for photographers who want RAID headroom alongside genuinely fast network access.
  • Flashstor 6 (FS6706T) - 6-bay, all-M.2-NVMe, 2.5 GbE. The fastest option for random access to a large, actively-edited library, since every bay is SSD rather than spinning disk.

All of these run the same ADM SMB stack, so the connection steps in this guide are identical across the range. What changes is how quickly thumbnails render and how many people can pull from the library at once.

Troubleshooting Asustor NAS connections

A handful of issues come up repeatedly with ADM, and each has a specific fix:

  • “Connection refused” or CullKit cannot find the NAS. SAMBA is probably disabled, or the IP address has changed. Check Settings → Services to confirm SMB is on, and Settings → Network → Network Interface for the current IP. Reserve a static DHCP lease in your router so the address stays fixed.
  • Credential prompt keeps repeating. The ADM username or password is wrong, or that user lacks permission on the shared folder. Open Access Control → Shared Folders, select the folder, and check the permissions tab to confirm your account has read and write access.
  • The share shows up but the folder looks empty. Some ADM shares default to admin-only visibility for other accounts. Edit the folder’s permissions under Access Control → Shared Folders and add your user explicitly.
  • Thumbnails or full-resolution previews load slowly. This is most common on the Realtek-based Drivestor models or over a weak Wi-Fi signal. Connect over 5 GHz Wi-Fi or, better, a wired Ethernet connection, and consider whether an app like ADM’s indexing service is running a background scan at the same time.
  • A specific RAW file will not open. CullKit supports the common RAW formats plus HEIC, JPEG, video, and Live Photos. A very new or unusual camera RAW variant may need a CullKit update before it is recognised, even if the file opens fine in Finder or the Files app.

Does culling over SMB keep my photos private?

Yes. Cloud-based culling tools need you to upload your library before you can review it, which defeats the point of owning a NAS in the first place. CullKit does all of its processing locally on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Your photos stay on your Asustor NAS and never touch a third-party server. Your ADM login is stored in your device’s Keychain, not in a CullKit account, because there is no CullKit account. (See the full breakdown in the FAQ.)

You bought an Asustor NAS to keep your library on your own hardware. CullKit does not change that arrangement, it just gives you a fast way to sort what is already there.

Getting started

CullKit runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, Apple platforms only, with no Android or Windows version. If you want to try the workflow before connecting your Asustor NAS, point CullKit at a local folder or an external SSD, or use the built-in demo mode to run a full culling session on sample images.

Browsing is free. The Pro subscription (seven-day free trial, then monthly or yearly) unlocks culling, star ratings, XMP metadata writes, moving files, and deleting. Download CullKit from the App Store or learn more at cullkit.com.

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Asustor Inc.

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