Adobe Photoshop Watch Folders Network Share Issue … and Solution

Introduction
I store all my photos on a shared network drive. This shared network drive is on Windows Home Server (WHS) because it keeps my all photos automatically on two hard discs. Also I backup WHS onto an external hard drive plus I also have 20 GIGs of space I use on Photoshop.com with to backup my best pictures.

Anyways….

The Problem
I have a folder in my photo folder called “FromWeb”, this is where I put pictures I find on the web I like to keep, mainly pictures of the family from Flickr, Facebook, etc. I wanted Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 to watch this folder so anytime I loaded Photoshop Elements it would tell if there was new pictures the folder that were not in the organizer.

First step was to add the folder “p:/FromWeb/”, which is a permanent mapped drive to a shared folder.  Photoshop Elements told me the path could not be found.

So instead of the mapped drive I used the full share path and entered ” \\TITAN\Photos\FromWeb\ ” and got a new error message saying the Adobe Service had received an accessed denied error.

Hmmm….
Solution
So I opened up my Services in the Control Panel and found a service called “Adobe Active File Monitor V8″. I noticed it was logging in as LocalSystem.

Well LocalSystem has no rights to the share on the network so maybe that is the root of the problem. So I changed the user account of the service to the user account I access the share with (the same account I use to log into my Windows desktop), restarted the service and presto, I could add network shares to my Watch Folders in Adobe Photoshop Elements 8. Now I still can’t add it as a mapped drive (i.e. “P:/”) but can use the full share path name (\\{server}\{sharename}\ i.e. \\TITAN\Photos\FromWeb\).

Summary
So if you use the Watch Folders feature in Photoshop Elements and want to watch a folder on a network share then make sure the Adobe Active File Monitor service has access to the share. You can use the account you use to access the share or some folks (the security guys) might make a separate read only account that only has access to Watch Folders list on the file server for the service.