I'm a digital art photographer and only shoot RAW files. l've listened to three of SpaceRex's well done videos and have found them helpful as I was lost in how to set up a DS223 Snyology. I purchased Snyology mainly to add it as another backup system and to be able to access my photos off site. Now that I've finally learned what Snyology is I'm not sure it's the system I need as a backup to protect my files. I had no idea how complicated this system was but will give it a go since I've already purchased it and it's set for months on my desk because I didn't know how to set it up. Thanks!! for your well done videos.
The 223 is backup if you use 2 drives. The RAID functions as the backup. RAID has 2 drive that are a copy or of each other. That is if you lose 1 drive your other drive still has a copy of the same file that was lost on the dead drive. You never have to worry about backups, and that mess. Buy like 2 4 TB drives and go that route. Learn about raid for the 223. Enjoy
@@alfloer9461 A Synology NAS isn't considered a backup by itself because it's mainly a storage device, the RAID drives provides redudancy in one type of media, but it's not to be confused with a backup. True backups need to be stored separately. If your NAS fails, gets corrupted, or is damaged, you could lose all your data. Always follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media, with 1 copy offsite.
I have so many questions: 1) How is facial recognition saved to a photo? In a separate database referencing the photo? Or is it written to the XF meta-data of the photo? 2) Can Synology Photos identify dups and suggest they be merged or the duplicates deleted? I'd be bringing in photos from icloud, google and amazon and there will be duplicates 3) Can you filter view the web view and the phone app by person, place or year and/or month? 4) I'd be telling family they can view or download photos but I also want them to be able to add photos, but I want to make sure they can't delete them - Does View and Download cover these two aspects? 5) Can you separate the photos from other areas of the NAS via volumes? For example: I want one volume for Document Management and one for vm's and containers for apps I work with and one for photos. 6) Can I backup the NAS to the cloud? Like P-Cloud? 6) If you don't feel that Synology Photos should not be your primary photo storage then what do you recommend?
Great video as always. In your intro you summed it up correctly: It's great for family and amateur use. Synology promotes it to this day as an app for professionals (of which I am one) and it isn't. For pro photographers it is unfortunately more or less useless. Just one very obvious example: Only square thumbnails in folder view. Ever looked at hundreds of images of people with the heads cut off...? Like many others I have been in touch many times with Synology but to this day nothing has been done and like others I keep running DSM 6 in a virtual machine to be able to use the old PhotoStation for client interaction. Such a shame as under the hood Photos is such a powerful application but Synology development has moved on and nothing has improved in years.
After viewing this video I'm thinking it won't work for me as a digital art photographer who shows RAW files and just wasted money on something complicated that I won't find useful.
Hi i have a question: is there an option how to automatically create folder/subfolder/year/month/day same as when you do photos backup (example:\Photos\MobileBackup\S21 Ultra\DCIM\Camera\2023\3 and all existing pictures would be alocated into specificed folder. At the moment I have like 10folders, where I have multiple pictures stored from different sources (phone, camera, 2nd phone, etc) and I would like to have this more structured the way photos backup does it, but I would not like to do this manually as I have over 200k pictures, which I gathered over the course of last couple of years. I would wish that all of those 10 existing folders are combined into a single folder based on creation date, I would than take care of duplicates with storage analyzer (if anything else is better I would like to hear your suggestions). I hope my question makes sense, looking forward to your reply.
Awesome video Will, thanks. However, I don't actually understand the argument about not making a NAS or, in this case, the photo app a primary source for photos. What should be the primary source then? A phone?I thought that people buy NASes to actually use them as a very reliable place for data. So, are you suggesting that we keep all the photos on both the phone and the NAS? I guess not everyone buys phones with, let's say, 512GB storage. To be clear, I understand that we should keep the most important files/photos in multiple places if we want to be really sure that we won't lose them.
Thanks Will! Another easy to understand and informative video. A few years ago I switched over from HP DL 350 SBS server to Synology NAS DS918+ and never regretted thanks to you. Your enthusiasm and great technical information has made the transition pretty easy. ... PS like the shirts.
It was talked about “more powerful” devices for facial recognition. Which Nas devices are best for facial recognition? Thank for everything! Love your videos!
Dopey Synology made Home the individual directory and Homes the shared directory HOWEVER inversed singular and plural for Photo and Photos? totally idiotic... should have kept Home & Photo as personal and Photos & Homes and shared...
Synology has improved this app more. It seems to no longer use the home folders, it only uses "photo". I know this becuase I am on the latest DSM and had to reinstall Synology Photo's and go through the setup process again; then add photos app to my phone and let it sync.
I hate the different space crap. You have to remember which space you put a photo into or you have to search in 2 places to find a it. Why not just show pic in the "shared" space? Makes no sense.
Hello! I am VERY new to all this, and am considering putting in a NAS for home use.... then you started talking about this photos.... MUCH of what would be put on the NAS is all my photos (JPG, RAW, PDF, et). Would I do the photos separately from the total NAS System set-up? or is this able to "mine" the photos out of the initial data upload in doing the total system "back-up/Recovery" stuff? (I hope this question makes sense....).
Tried Synology Photo last night, instantly regret it. It created Home and homes folder, but then when I copy my 20 years of photos, it just couldn't handle them. It took like 10 hours to copy 4 TB of data, and by morning the indexing was still going (only 6k photos indexed) I have about 180k photos, this rate will take weeks. It's a waste of time, and storage space as index cause 4TB to expand to 8TB (i'm not even sure how that's possible) So I just uninstalling the app and moved by 4TB of photos from Homes back to the orgin partition. Garbage software and bad indexing bug. I will only recommend this if you are starting fresh with just few hundred photos maybe it will work fine. Don't put your old photos at risk with this!
Thanks for the video! I've been a google photos person for a while and have been trying out synology photos for a few weeks now. One of the main things I miss though is the ability to search for items that are in the photos, like "outside" to find photos I took outside, or "food" or dialing it in with "steak".
Will, great video. The only complaint I have is with personal space and albums. I think there should be an indicator in personal space to show which photos are in albums. Otherwise, you'll be flipping back and forth to see if you missed some. Also, the option to hide photos in personal space that are in albums.
If it helps, you can add the same photos to the same album again - it will not duplicate them. I always re-add all photos from an event to make sure I haven't missed any. I wish I could create a conditioned album, but I would accept your indicator idea as well 😅
How do I create an album via Macos finder? If I have my NAS connected to Finder it takes me 20 seconds to upload a GB. However the folder itself doesn't appear as an album in Synology photos, just random single photos on the timeline. I've tried to use the Synology photos app though the browser, but for some reason it's incredibly slow and takes about an hour for what takes 20 seconds if I drag to my nas through Finder
Hey Will! Thank you! I recently got an 1821+ and its going great. Next step is getting everything backed up! Your videos have made this process actually possible for me! I would love to see a video about sharing videos to clients, as I am a videographer. The main issue I'm running into is when clients open share links on mobile browsers with a cellular connection, videos load incredibly slow and sometimes never do. If there was a way to auto-transcode lower quality renders for viewing, similar to dropbox, would be so cool!
Similar issue- we backup photos to Synology, but its a far slower load time than iCloud. Are there tricks to setting up the connection so it goes direct to the NAS over wifi versus up to the quickconnect server and back? Does it make any difference? Thanks
You have to obtain public ip from your isp then create a domain through synology settings. You then obtain certificate through lets encrypt - also through synology settings. Then you have to setup port forwarding from router to your synology. Easiest and not so secure way is through upnp which u have to enable on your router. Then you let synology setup ports. Then you go into router, look for port forwarding table, do a printscreen. Disable upnp, the table should be empty again. Fill fields from your printscreen. Basically use only these ports which corresponds to the specific funcionality which u want to have enabled. Like only port 5001 for synology photos. Then poke around with another pc connected to different network (like hotspot on your phone) whether it connects to your link from the new domain which you have just configured.
As for auto transcoding i dont think that's possible by default synology apps. But you can use opensource ffmpeg to transcode videos to lower bitrate with new name then share it with clients online.
Great video. I do have one question regarding an issue I’m having. When enabling mobile phone backup on my iPhone, it begins uploading my 2,000-some photos and videos, but gets stuck on a long (1.5-hour 4K) video. I recognize it will take a while, but I left it for hours on end and it never got past it. Are there often issues with backing up videos through the mobile app or might it just be because the file is quite big?
Of course it's more complicated than I hoped it would be. People are saying Synology made some changes, can you do an updated version of this if that is the case?
I am an amateur photographer. I have just purchased a Synology NAS. All I want to do is store (and backup) my pics (and videos) and view them on my LG Smart TV. I was using PLEX on the TV but found it very confusing from a file aspect and PLEX does not display ANY of my Pics (just the videos). I am totally confused about how to do this - which should not be difficult. I have downloaded Synology Photos and the Synology Media Server but I am still confused. Shouldn’t be this difficult? Any comments from anyone would help me.
I'm still using Photostation because the way Synology implemented Photos in my opinion is the worst of both worlds. What I would have loved is to be able to browse Albums and then apply Metadata filtering. But the way they implemented it now is a selection. Either go via Photos (essentially Moments) or Albums (essentially Photostation) but it doesn't mix functionality. I emailed them about this 2 yrs ago, but it was never implemented so I guess it's not worth it for them and leads me to believe that it's not build from the ground up, but just a front end for two separate products.
Hey Will, your videos are great. Couple questions. Once you add a user. What is that users process to get to my NAS from their phone or computer, step by step. Do they sign in from the Synology photo app? If they are on their computer how do they navigate to get there? #2 can they share photos with someone who is not a user on my NAS? #3 what about video files? Any considerations? If my son shoots video and wants to get me that footage, can he go into the Synology photo app and upload it and send it to me? Thanks. Really enjoy your style and no nonsense video presentations! You have a very sincere and humble persona. It’s actually a pleasure to listen to you speak. Big fan! My wife too!
My Synology NAS is on my home network. It's "url" is an internal ip address on my network. How would I create a publicly available url for the space, so I can share photos with people outside my network?
Thanks so much for making these videos, they help tremendously! I have a quick question about the Shared Space. I understand how it works and its purpose, my question is this: when uploading a bunch of pictures there for "everyone" to see, the images just all get dropped into the root of the folder (I am copying them there from another shared folder on the NAS -- I'm converting to use Photos rather than having scattered pictures). So far, I have like 6000 image files there. Should I be creating some folder structure through File Station (for example, year folders at the root) and then moving images into sub-folders? Or is it okay to just keep dumping all the images straight into the root of /photo?
Thanks Will! A tip to other viewers about 15:01 and that uses folder view like me. If you want to automatically create folders by year/month after importing, use timeline view, not folder. Using folder view, photos will be uploaded to that "specified" folder, i.e the open folder.
Hi Marco, so if I migrate photos using the file explorer (not the photo app) and then I switch to my timline view the year/month folder structure will be created automatically?
Hi. If you migrate using file explorer, the photos app will maintain your folder structure and you can see that using the (folder view) to navigate, the same way you do in file explorer. Then, switching to (timeline view) the photos will be arranged by date, giving you a vertical bar to scroll between years and months, BUT preserving your folder structure.
Great video as always. I’m wondering if you could make a video about having one HD in a Synology just for backup. So this hd should be ALWAYS sleeping. Just waking up when it would be backup time. Let’s say, once a week. If this is possible, I think I will buy another HD just for backup.
20:21 :D exactly every wife and woman I know :D amazing video. I set up my home NAS thanks to you. The only think I am strugling with is Google photos and takeout. How to merge jpg and json files easily? Is it necesarry to merge jpg and json? Any tips?
I created a shared photo for my family to access and its basically duplicating my personal photos and taking up double the space. Its really dumb the way shared folder is set up. Synology needs to make their UI more user friendly. Why would I want to create a shared photos if its going to eat up double the storage? Makes no sense.
What is the best way to use synology photo and to keep my files structures ? Copy everything twice ? Right now I have around 100k pictures and videos that is structured as follow : year, month, subject/trip , and for the kids , since birth , year/week/subject. I’m doing that method since 2007. I would like to keep that structure but be able to share everything with my wife and 2 kids.
Quick question - I was going to use synology as a primary photo backup (then back up to C2 or back blaze), but you mention you wouldn’t use synology as a primary. What do you recommend for a primary?
I watched several of your Synology Videos and this is really great very professional and fun to watch content. Thank you very much, it made me setup my new ds923+ in no time. Should you decide to upload more Synology videos, I will happily watch them all!
Hello Will, How can i share files from my mobile backup in my "personal space" with the folder i created on my "Shared space" under all photos ? Do i have to copy them there, loosing space on my disk? better to move them ? what should i do ? Thank you !!
Quick question - I was going to use my synology as a primary photo backup (then back up to C2 or back blaze), but near the end you mention you wouldn’t use synology as a primary. What do you recommend for a primary?
Thanks for the awesome tutorial. Why don't you like Synology Photos as your primary source of truth? Fear that the photos app breaks/modifies photos/metadata without noticing? I do have >500 Gigs of memories and I don't want to hold artificial copies on the NAS one for the "real" source of truth and one for the Photos app under /photo. What were your doubts?
How do you fix the "unsecured connection" issue when connecting to the NAS on my network and also when opening Synology photos on my phone? I followed the guide on to create a certificate using Let's Encrypt but I am still having the issue. It is very annoying to see it when opening Synology photos especially.
Its a shame that youre still not able to tell Synology Photos to "look" in a specific location. I dont want to move all my pictures into the /photo folder...
How can I run the facial AI function on existing photos on my Synology NAS (home/main) folder? If I add my main folder from my NAS to Synology Photos will it try to copy/duplicate everything? I just want to utilize the facial recognition with photos already stored throughout my NAS.
Mobile upload SUPER SLOW issue - Hi, I'm having trouble uploading photos with the iOS Photos Mobile application. It seems like some photos take more than 15-30 minutes just to upload ONE photo and I thousands of photos. I'm guessing part of the slowness comes from Synology creating thumbnails for each photo, but beyond that, I can't figure out why it's taking so long to upload photos. The slowness is so bad that it makes this app almost useless. Does anyone else know how to fix this? Thank you so much!!! I really want to like this app. Currently there is so much potential yet so frustrating to use due to the slowness.
I don't understand - I can't see the timeline view anymore, even though I am an admin (the only user on my NAS). The IOS app works fine, but logged on the web, I only have access at folder level. It was working fine a few days ago... unsure what I did :'((((((
I keep all my photos on the NAS. When 'uploading' photos to the Synology Photos App, are the photos copied (duplicated), moved or just pointed to? I will be putting only select photos (still a significant number) into the photos app, not my entire catalogue.
HI Will, Brad from Sydney Australia Strange problem I cannot solve. I have videos that I have moved from a shared folder to my personal space. The videos in the shared folder and personal space only show grainy video - However- as I have set up an account with (synology) Mobile Photos app, I now can access the same videos on my Iphone. Strange thing- The ' app' has managed to transcode the same videos perfectly viewing from my Iphone with sound and vision. What am I missing here? Any help will be much appreciated..Brad
Thank you Will.. This was helpful. I have a couple of questions for you.. 1st question. I mistakenly "cleared" space on my phone and found it deleted my icloud photos.. I did it because I got a message that said I had insufficient space to complete the backup. Still getting that message by the way. But I do like keeping icloud photos as well and am not sure how to move my photos back to icloud. 2nd question. I noticed for some reason, that I have duplicates on synology photos.. how do I delete the duplicates? Thank you again for all of your good advice.
whenever I install my Synology Photos and set it up just like you do it just creates a folder Photos_Admin_"date"_Conflict... when I try to upload directly it doesnt work either and again just creates a folder saying the same thing. Can someone please help me? I am a noob when it comes to servers and IT stuff... I just wanted to back up my photos.
When I try to share the link to an album, it wont give me a quick connect link. Does anyone know why this might be? I have quick connect enabled through DSM.
@spacerex How to set up for non-admin user - view "as timeline" in shared space in mobile app? Non-admin user can see photos from personal space "as timeline" - but shared space only "by folders". [Android app but probably in iPhone app is the same problem]
My wife has about a billion photos on her phone and I'm deathly afraid to try to back that up to my synology Nas. On my android I can customize which folders to backup. Is this feature available for the I phone. She also takes about 10 pictures each time and goes back a few days later and picks the best one. How can I not have all those backed up unnecessarily
When moving photos from Personal Space (auto backup from my mobile) to Shared Space (so entire family can see them) I have to select a folder (year/month) as the destination. This is quite manual in nature while initial upload to personal space auto recognizes the date time stamp and automatically chooses the correct folder to send the file. Is this the most efficient way to do this or should I utilize shared albums instead?
I moved to DSM 7.2 and I want to share all my photos to the public. So no login. It is possible with DSM 6 but in DSM 7.2 I couldn’t find how to setup. 😢 I connected my nas to my website.
I've have old smart tv and can use only DLNA feature to watch photos and videos on it, there is any chance to watch kida photos only. Can photos share kids album as DLNA share?
may I know how to save my whole Mac photo library to Synology in the original folders in my photo library? it is not useful if it is sorted by Year / month. Please help as I have 60,000 photos that I need to save in Synology as back up.
nice video; i don't think Synology works like this; but it would be nice if it didn't "Double up" the photos in either place. If i were sending to the evil cloud; i wouldn't care. But if i share it twice, a 2 GB video is 4GB with multiple copies.
Great tutorial but I still don't understand how to give users web access to Synology Photos. I don't want to give them DSM access, just the Photos and Drive apps and the web versions of those.
Can I add subfolders to Conditional Album? Now in that album are 0 fotos (because all are in subfolders). It is not possible to add hundreds of folders to albums! It makes me crazy (and my wife angry), I can not share my photos to others in my family (and vice versa). 1. I do not want to move fotos outside of my home folder (or other family members outside of theirs home folder) 2. I want to share all of my fotos to others and others with me.
I really wanted to use Synology photos and be able to remove certain albums from my phone but have them remain blacked up on the NAS. Yes, like the Free up space feature, but that feature deletes everything from your phone. i only want a few albums removed. Im thinking maybe juta delete those albums from my phone gallery but im wondering if that would delete them from the NAS, like a sync ?
Wow, that is a huge claim! Why wouldn't you want to have this Nas as main storage? What would you use instead? I've got all my photos on google photos, but I feel I should get a different storage solution. Thought synology could be the one, but you don't agree.
This and your video to tie lightroom into my nas has saved me from a right mess. So i cant thank you enough. one question i do have tho is if i have all my files organised for lightroom in my photography folder, is there a way to set the folder to be veiwed in synology photos without dublicating them into the photo folder? thus taking up more space for no reason?
Thanks for the helpful vids! One potentially big gotcha to be aware of when getting started - which frankly makes NO sense to me: the handy, automatic, date-based foldering that happens under the system-generated /photo/PhotoLibrary shared space ONLY works if you drag and drop/upload while in the Timeline View. If you happen to be in the Folder View at the time of upload, it dumps your uploads into the currently-displayed folder, which if you're just getting started, is the root-level All Photos folder. Worse yet, it ditches any sub-folders that might be part of the upload, lumping everything together in one big pile. The software developer in me understands the logic, but it should absolutely have a warning/confirmation when viewing that top-level folder that uploads dropped here will be unsorted when the dust settles.
So if I have all my photos backed up to synology and I get a new iphone how would I restore all the photos back to my new phone? Also, would there be any consequences for doing this such as loss of quality or loss of live photo etc...?
I made the mistake of not using the default folder structure for mobile backup and just dumped all my iphones photos and videos into a single folder. Any easy fix or would it be best to delete the folder and start the process over?
I've watched and looked into different NAS drives. The issue I have with the Synology and many others is Admin being able to see photos of every user. In a family set up. Is there a way of not seeing the photos? I get you can see the folder but for privacy don't want one user to be able to see the photos
Can the People directory and facial recognition in shared space work without giving everyone administrator rights to Synology Photos? this is a big security issue.
Hello Will, thanks for the tutorial! One question though: When I was organizing the People Album, there was some pictures that weren't correctly identified, so I removed them from the people album, but now when I access those photos, there is no way to reassign to another person. It seems that you can do the reassign to a new person when you detect it was wrongly identified, but if you remove it, there is no way to "retag" it again. Any suggestion?
@@PNW_KT I've been in the Synology webpage and it seems it is not possible to do what we need, but there is a workaround. Download the photos you need to tag, delete them from the NAS and then do the upload again. The Synology will process them again as it were different new photos.
Thanks Will. Always a great tutorial! Quick question on Synology Photos... I'm looking at migrating a heap of old photos on some external HDD's into my new DS923+.. I'm keen to be able to use the Synology Photos display/sharing functions.. What is the best/easier way to copy across 2tb of images... Directly into photos via mapped drive? I've tried a test however when copying direct into the mapped 'photos' drive, they are visible in file manager however I can't see them in the Synology Photos App! Thanks in advance
How can I do that if it's not shown to me. I have an old ds110j. I can't install true internet due to synology completely erased this packages from the net.
why would you want to trust a phone more than a NAS for a master data storage of photos? or do you mean icloud? if not on an iphone you dont have to store your photos in some public cloud so to use a NAS for this instead of your phone that breaks or gets lost feels like the whole point of a NAS? really confusing take.
Once you upload your iphone photos to your NAS via the photos app and delete them from the iphone, I see it retains live photo option in the photos app from synology but is there a way to re-save it back to the iphone native photos folder so you can go in and edit the portrait depth of field options or live photo? If not then I don't see the benefit of offloading them.
Grazie! Questo è proprio un ottimo video. Faccio molta fatica perchè non conosco l'inglese però l'hai fatto talmente bene che riguardandolo più volte arrivo a capire tutto. Grazie complimenti. Ho tantissime foto fatte negli anni, ho vari backup sopratutto di imac che hanno creato un po di confusione nel tempo sopratutto con whatsapp. Vorrei fare pulizia trovando e cancellando anche i duplicati con nome diverso o con estensione diversa, Potresti consigliarmi qualcosa? In ogni caso grazie. ciao
Why can’t I just move photos from my personal space to the shared space and Synology automatically moves it at the correct place in the folder structure? This will end up in a mess if different family members share photos. Or did I miss something?
Thanks for the video Will, well explained and really useful. I'm having an issue though; when importing old photos & videos (like 6-7 years old), some of the video's won't play and I'm getting the error: "File cannot be displayed due to a conversion failure". The strange thing is, the format is I believe compatible (like .MOV or .MTS files) and this does not happen for all video's. I tried re-indexing, but this didn't help. Do you have any idea what this could be? Thanks!
Will, great video, extremely useful. Thank you so much. Once I share a photo/video from my personal space to the shared space, does it create another copy of the same photo/video, or is it just a shortcut to the original file? And is there an option to back up family phones staight to shared folder so all family photos are all in 1 place?
I'm a digital art photographer and only shoot RAW files. l've listened to three of SpaceRex's well done videos and have found them helpful as I was lost in how to set up a DS223 Snyology. I purchased Snyology mainly to add it as another backup system and to be able to access my photos off site. Now that I've finally learned what Snyology is I'm not sure it's the system I need as a backup to protect my files. I had no idea how complicated this system was but will give it a go since I've already purchased it and it's set for months on my desk because I didn't know how to set it up. Thanks!! for your well done videos.
The 223 is backup if you use 2 drives. The RAID functions as the backup. RAID has 2 drive that are a copy or of each other. That is if you lose 1 drive your other drive still has a copy of the same file that was lost on the dead drive. You never have to worry about backups, and that mess. Buy like 2 4 TB drives and go that route. Learn about raid for the 223. Enjoy
@@alfloer9461 A Synology NAS isn't considered a backup by itself because it's mainly a storage device, the RAID drives provides redudancy in one type of media, but it's not to be confused with a backup. True backups need to be stored separately. If your NAS fails, gets corrupted, or is damaged, you could lose all your data. Always follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media, with 1 copy offsite.
I have so many questions: 1) How is facial recognition saved to a photo? In a separate database referencing the photo? Or is it written to the XF meta-data of the photo? 2) Can Synology Photos identify dups and suggest they be merged or the duplicates deleted? I'd be bringing in photos from icloud, google and amazon and there will be duplicates 3) Can you filter view the web view and the phone app by person, place or year and/or month? 4) I'd be telling family they can view or download photos but I also want them to be able to add photos, but I want to make sure they can't delete them - Does View and Download cover these two aspects? 5) Can you separate the photos from other areas of the NAS via volumes? For example: I want one volume for Document Management and one for vm's and containers for apps I work with and one for photos. 6) Can I backup the NAS to the cloud? Like P-Cloud? 6) If you don't feel that Synology Photos should not be your primary photo storage then what do you recommend?
Great video as always. In your intro you summed it up correctly: It's great for family and amateur use. Synology promotes it to this day as an app for professionals (of which I am one) and it isn't. For pro photographers it is unfortunately more or less useless. Just one very obvious example: Only square thumbnails in folder view. Ever looked at hundreds of images of people with the heads cut off...?
Like many others I have been in touch many times with Synology but to this day nothing has been done and like others I keep running DSM 6 in a virtual machine to be able to use the old PhotoStation for client interaction. Such a shame as under the hood Photos is such a powerful application but Synology development has moved on and nothing has improved in years.
After viewing this video I'm thinking it won't work for me as a digital art photographer who shows RAW files and just wasted money on something complicated that I won't find useful.
How do I have photos save by default to this app instead of the iphone photos app?
Hi i have a question:
is there an option how to automatically create folder/subfolder/year/month/day same as when you do photos backup (example:\Photos\MobileBackup\S21 Ultra\DCIM\Camera\2023\3 and all existing pictures would be alocated into specificed folder.
At the moment I have like 10folders, where I have multiple pictures stored from different sources (phone, camera, 2nd phone, etc) and I would like to have this more structured the way photos backup does it, but I would not like to do this manually as I have over 200k pictures, which I gathered over the course of last couple of years.
I would wish that all of those 10 existing folders are combined into a single folder based on creation date, I would than take care of duplicates with storage analyzer (if anything else is better I would like to hear your suggestions).
I hope my question makes sense, looking forward to your reply.
Better to see some "i" icons next to Folders that explain which folder has the which permission etc.
i got 2tb of photos in other drive. is there way to link with "photo" folder or i need to copy whole 2tb photos, paste into "photos" folder?
Awesome video Will, thanks. However, I don't actually understand the argument about not making a NAS or, in this case, the photo app a primary source for photos. What should be the primary source then? A phone?I thought that people buy NASes to actually use them as a very reliable place for data. So, are you suggesting that we keep all the photos on both the phone and the NAS? I guess not everyone buys phones with, let's say, 512GB storage. To be clear, I understand that we should keep the most important files/photos in multiple places if we want to be really sure that we won't lose them.
Synology drive and photos make their nas worth it
Thanks Will! Another easy to understand and informative video. A few years ago I switched over from HP DL 350 SBS server to Synology NAS DS918+ and never regretted thanks to you. Your enthusiasm and great technical information has made the transition pretty easy. ... PS like the shirts.
Sharing your knowledge in this level of depth (and for free) deserves much respect. Many thanks!
My favourite TH-camr. Seriously, nobody covers any topic as well as you do with NAS topics.
Thanks man!
It was talked about “more powerful” devices for facial recognition. Which Nas devices are best for facial recognition? Thank for everything! Love your videos!
Dopey Synology made Home the individual directory and Homes the shared directory HOWEVER inversed singular and plural for Photo and Photos? totally idiotic... should have kept Home & Photo as personal and Photos & Homes and shared...
Synology has improved this app more. It seems to no longer use the home folders, it only uses "photo". I know this becuase I am on the latest DSM and had to reinstall Synology Photo's and go through the setup process again; then add photos app to my phone and let it sync.
I hate the different space crap. You have to remember which space you put a photo into or you have to search in 2 places to find a it. Why not just show pic in the "shared" space? Makes no sense.
Hello! I am VERY new to all this, and am considering putting in a NAS for home use.... then you started talking about this photos.... MUCH of what would be put on the NAS is all my photos (JPG, RAW, PDF, et). Would I do the photos separately from the total NAS System set-up? or is this able to "mine" the photos out of the initial data upload in doing the total system "back-up/Recovery" stuff? (I hope this question makes sense....).
You should make a version 2 of this videos to include all the updates
Tried Synology Photo last night, instantly regret it. It created Home and homes folder, but then when I copy my 20 years of photos, it just couldn't handle them. It took like 10 hours to copy 4 TB of data, and by morning the indexing was still going (only 6k photos indexed) I have about 180k photos, this rate will take weeks. It's a waste of time, and storage space as index cause 4TB to expand to 8TB (i'm not even sure how that's possible) So I just uninstalling the app and moved by 4TB of photos from Homes back to the orgin partition. Garbage software and bad indexing bug. I will only recommend this if you are starting fresh with just few hundred photos maybe it will work fine. Don't put your old photos at risk with this!
Thanks for the video! I've been a google photos person for a while and have been trying out synology photos for a few weeks now. One of the main things I miss though is the ability to search for items that are in the photos, like "outside" to find photos I took outside, or "food" or dialing it in with "steak".
yeah me too!
Will, great video. The only complaint I have is with personal space and albums. I think there should be an indicator in personal space to show which photos are in albums. Otherwise, you'll be flipping back and forth to see if you missed some. Also, the option to hide photos in personal space that are in albums.
If it helps, you can add the same photos to the same album again - it will not duplicate them. I always re-add all photos from an event to make sure I haven't missed any.
I wish I could create a conditioned album, but I would accept your indicator idea as well 😅
Thanks for mentioning. I was wondering if they had a hide feature. Also, any idea on photo editing inside the NAS?
@@kerrin6633 Rex has a video on using photoshop with the synology!
@@cyberwasp461 thanks so much!!
How do I create an album via Macos finder? If I have my NAS connected to Finder it takes me 20 seconds to upload a GB. However the folder itself doesn't appear as an album in Synology photos, just random single photos on the timeline. I've tried to use the Synology photos app though the browser, but for some reason it's incredibly slow and takes about an hour for what takes 20 seconds if I drag to my nas through Finder
Hey Will! Thank you! I recently got an 1821+ and its going great. Next step is getting everything backed up! Your videos have made this process actually possible for me!
I would love to see a video about sharing videos to clients, as I am a videographer. The main issue I'm running into is when clients open share links on mobile browsers with a cellular connection, videos load incredibly slow and sometimes never do. If there was a way to auto-transcode lower quality renders for viewing, similar to dropbox, would be so cool!
Similar issue- we backup photos to Synology, but its a far slower load time than iCloud. Are there tricks to setting up the connection so it goes direct to the NAS over wifi versus up to the quickconnect server and back? Does it make any difference? Thanks
You have to obtain public ip from your isp then create a domain through synology settings. You then obtain certificate through lets encrypt - also through synology settings. Then you have to setup port forwarding from router to your synology. Easiest and not so secure way is through upnp which u have to enable on your router. Then you let synology setup ports. Then you go into router, look for port forwarding table, do a printscreen. Disable upnp, the table should be empty again. Fill fields from your printscreen. Basically use only these ports which corresponds to the specific funcionality which u want to have enabled. Like only port 5001 for synology photos. Then poke around with another pc connected to different network (like hotspot on your phone) whether it connects to your link from the new domain which you have just configured.
As for auto transcoding i dont think that's possible by default synology apps. But you can use opensource ffmpeg to transcode videos to lower bitrate with new name then share it with clients online.
i too need this, I currently use Vimeo but worth knowing if it can be done this way
Great video. I do have one question regarding an issue I’m having. When enabling mobile phone backup on my iPhone, it begins uploading my 2,000-some photos and videos, but gets stuck on a long (1.5-hour 4K) video. I recognize it will take a while, but I left it for hours on end and it never got past it.
Are there often issues with backing up videos through the mobile app or might it just be because the file is quite big?
Did you ever get the answer to your question?
I wish Synology Photos would let me use point the directory to my own folders
Of course it's more complicated than I hoped it would be. People are saying Synology made some changes, can you do an updated version of this if that is the case?
I am an amateur photographer. I have just purchased a Synology NAS. All I want to do is store (and backup) my pics (and videos) and view them on my LG Smart TV. I was using PLEX on the TV but found it very confusing from a file aspect and PLEX does not display ANY of my Pics (just the videos). I am totally confused about how to do this - which should not be difficult. I have downloaded Synology Photos and the Synology Media Server but I am still confused. Shouldn’t be this difficult? Any comments from anyone would help me.
I'm still using Photostation because the way Synology implemented Photos in my opinion is the worst of both worlds. What I would have loved is to be able to browse Albums and then apply Metadata filtering. But the way they implemented it now is a selection. Either go via Photos (essentially Moments) or Albums (essentially Photostation) but it doesn't mix functionality. I emailed them about this 2 yrs ago, but it was never implemented so I guess it's not worth it for them and leads me to believe that it's not build from the ground up, but just a front end for two separate products.
Hey Will, your videos are great. Couple questions. Once you add a user. What is that users process to get to my NAS from their phone or computer, step by step. Do they sign in from the Synology photo app? If they are on their computer how do they navigate to get there? #2 can they share photos with someone who is not a user on my NAS? #3 what about video files? Any considerations? If my son shoots video and wants to get me that footage, can he go into the Synology photo app and upload it and send it to me?
Thanks. Really enjoy your style and no nonsense video presentations! You have a very sincere and humble persona. It’s actually a pleasure to listen to you speak. Big fan! My wife too!
My Synology NAS is on my home network. It's "url" is an internal ip address on my network. How would I create a publicly available url for the space, so I can share photos with people outside my network?
Thanks so much for making these videos, they help tremendously! I have a quick question about the Shared Space. I understand how it works and its purpose, my question is this: when uploading a bunch of pictures there for "everyone" to see, the images just all get dropped into the root of the folder (I am copying them there from another shared folder on the NAS -- I'm converting to use Photos rather than having scattered pictures). So far, I have like 6000 image files there. Should I be creating some folder structure through File Station (for example, year folders at the root) and then moving images into sub-folders? Or is it okay to just keep dumping all the images straight into the root of /photo?
Thanks Will! A tip to other viewers about 15:01 and that uses folder view like me. If you want to automatically create folders by year/month after importing, use timeline view, not folder. Using folder view, photos will be uploaded to that "specified" folder, i.e the open folder.
Hi Marco, so if I migrate photos using the file explorer (not the photo app) and then I switch to my timline view the year/month folder structure will be created automatically?
Hi. If you migrate using file explorer, the photos app will maintain your folder structure and you can see that using the (folder view) to navigate, the same way you do in file explorer. Then, switching to (timeline view) the photos will be arranged by date, giving you a vertical bar to scroll between years and months, BUT preserving your folder structure.
Great video as always. I’m wondering if you could make a video about having one HD in a Synology just for backup. So this hd should be ALWAYS sleeping. Just waking up when it would be backup time. Let’s say, once a week. If this is possible, I think I will buy another HD just for backup.
20:21 :D exactly every wife and woman I know :D
amazing video. I set up my home NAS thanks to you. The only think I am strugling with is Google photos and takeout.
How to merge jpg and json files easily?
Is it necesarry to merge jpg and json?
Any tips?
I created a shared photo for my family to access and its basically duplicating my personal photos and taking up double the space. Its really dumb the way shared folder is set up. Synology needs to make their UI more user friendly. Why would I want to create a shared photos if its going to eat up double the storage? Makes no sense.
What is the best way to use synology photo and to keep my files structures ? Copy everything twice ? Right now I have around 100k pictures and videos that is structured as follow : year, month, subject/trip , and for the kids , since birth , year/week/subject. I’m doing that method since 2007. I would like to keep that structure but be able to share everything with my wife and 2 kids.
Quick question - I was going to use synology as a primary photo backup (then back up to C2 or back blaze), but you mention you wouldn’t use synology as a primary. What do you recommend for a primary?
I watched several of your Synology Videos and this is really great very professional and fun to watch content. Thank you very much, it made me setup my new ds923+ in no time. Should you decide to upload more Synology videos, I will happily watch them all!
Hello Will,
How can i share files from my mobile backup in my "personal space" with the folder i created on my "Shared space" under all photos ? Do i have to copy them there, loosing space on my disk? better to move them ? what should i do ? Thank you !!
Quick question - I was going to use my synology as a primary photo backup (then back up to C2 or back blaze), but near the end you mention you wouldn’t use synology as a primary. What do you recommend for a primary?
Thanks for the awesome tutorial. Why don't you like Synology Photos as your primary source of truth? Fear that the photos app breaks/modifies photos/metadata without noticing? I do have >500 Gigs of memories and I don't want to hold artificial copies on the NAS one for the "real" source of truth and one for the Photos app under /photo. What were your doubts?
How do you fix the "unsecured connection" issue when connecting to the NAS on my network and also when opening Synology photos on my phone? I followed the guide on to create a certificate using Let's Encrypt but I am still having the issue. It is very annoying to see it when opening Synology photos especially.
Its a shame that youre still not able to tell Synology Photos to "look" in a specific location. I dont want to move all my pictures into the /photo folder...
How can I run the facial AI function on existing photos on my Synology NAS (home/main) folder? If I add my main folder from my NAS to Synology Photos will it try to copy/duplicate everything? I just want to utilize the facial recognition with photos already stored throughout my NAS.
Mobile upload SUPER SLOW issue - Hi, I'm having trouble uploading photos with the iOS Photos Mobile application. It seems like some photos take more than 15-30 minutes just to upload ONE photo and I thousands of photos. I'm guessing part of the slowness comes from Synology creating thumbnails for each photo, but beyond that, I can't figure out why it's taking so long to upload photos. The slowness is so bad that it makes this app almost useless. Does anyone else know how to fix this? Thank you so much!!! I really want to like this app. Currently there is so much potential yet so frustrating to use due to the slowness.
I don't understand - I can't see the timeline view anymore, even though I am an admin (the only user on my NAS). The IOS app works fine, but logged on the web, I only have access at folder level. It was working fine a few days ago... unsure what I did :'((((((
I keep all my photos on the NAS. When 'uploading' photos to the Synology Photos App, are the photos copied (duplicated), moved or just pointed to? I will be putting only select photos (still a significant number) into the photos app, not my entire catalogue.
HI Will, Brad from Sydney Australia Strange problem I cannot solve. I have videos that I have moved from a shared folder to my personal space. The videos in the shared folder and personal space only show grainy video - However- as I have set up an account with (synology) Mobile Photos app, I now can access the same videos on my Iphone. Strange thing- The ' app' has managed to transcode the same videos perfectly viewing from my Iphone with sound and vision. What am I missing here? Any help will be much appreciated..Brad
Thank you Will.. This was helpful. I have a couple of questions for you.. 1st question. I mistakenly "cleared" space on my phone and found it deleted my icloud photos.. I did it because I got a message that said I had insufficient space to complete the backup. Still getting that message by the way. But I do like keeping icloud photos as well and am not sure how to move my photos back to icloud. 2nd question. I noticed for some reason, that I have duplicates on synology photos.. how do I delete the duplicates? Thank you again for all of your good advice.
whenever I install my Synology Photos and set it up just like you do it just creates a folder Photos_Admin_"date"_Conflict... when I try to upload directly it doesnt work either and again just creates a folder saying the same thing. Can someone please help me? I am a noob when it comes to servers and IT stuff... I just wanted to back up my photos.
When I try to share the link to an album, it wont give me a quick connect link. Does anyone know why this might be? I have quick connect enabled through DSM.
@spacerex How to set up for non-admin user - view "as timeline" in shared space in mobile app? Non-admin user can see photos from personal space "as timeline" - but shared space only "by folders". [Android app but probably in iPhone app is the same problem]
There is no way, only way is to give full access
My wife has about a billion photos on her phone and I'm deathly afraid to try to back that up to my synology Nas. On my android I can customize which folders to backup. Is this feature available for the I phone. She also takes about 10 pictures each time and goes back a few days later and picks the best one. How can I not have all those backed up unnecessarily
When moving photos from Personal Space (auto backup from my mobile) to Shared Space (so entire family can see them) I have to select a folder (year/month) as the destination. This is quite manual in nature while initial upload to personal space auto recognizes the date time stamp and automatically chooses the correct folder to send the file. Is this the most efficient way to do this or should I utilize shared albums instead?
I moved to DSM 7.2 and I want to share all my photos to the public. So no login. It is possible with DSM 6 but in DSM 7.2 I couldn’t find how to setup. 😢
I connected my nas to my website.
I've have old smart tv and can use only DLNA feature to watch photos and videos on it, there is any chance to watch kida photos only. Can photos share kids album as DLNA share?
may I know how to save my whole Mac photo library to Synology in the original folders in my photo library? it is not useful if it is sorted by Year / month. Please help as I have 60,000 photos that I need to save in Synology as back up.
i know im pretty late commenting but... 5 stars worth video Will! thanks so so much Bro
nice video; i don't think Synology works like this; but it would be nice if it didn't "Double up" the photos in either place. If i were sending to the evil cloud; i wouldn't care. But if i share it twice, a 2 GB video is 4GB with multiple copies.
Great tutorial but I still don't understand how to give users web access to Synology Photos. I don't want to give them DSM access, just the Photos and Drive apps and the web versions of those.
Thank you for your very detailed step by step explanation.
Can I add subfolders to Conditional Album? Now in that album are 0 fotos (because all are in subfolders). It is not possible to add hundreds of folders to albums! It makes me crazy (and my wife angry), I can not share my photos to others in my family (and vice versa).
1. I do not want to move fotos outside of my home folder (or other family members outside of theirs home folder)
2. I want to share all of my fotos to others and others with me.
I really wanted to use Synology photos and be able to remove certain albums from my phone but have them remain blacked up on the NAS. Yes, like the Free up space feature, but that feature deletes everything from your phone. i only want a few albums removed. Im thinking maybe juta delete those albums from my phone gallery but im wondering if that would delete them from the NAS, like a sync ?
Wow, that is a huge claim! Why wouldn't you want to have this Nas as main storage?
What would you use instead?
I've got all my photos on google photos, but I feel I should get a different storage solution. Thought synology could be the one, but you don't agree.
This and your video to tie lightroom into my nas has saved me from a right mess. So i cant thank you enough.
one question i do have tho is if i have all my files organised for lightroom in my photography folder, is there a way to set the folder to be veiwed in synology photos without dublicating them into the photo folder? thus taking up more space for no reason?
Thanks for the helpful vids! One potentially big gotcha to be aware of when getting started - which frankly makes NO sense to me: the handy, automatic, date-based foldering that happens under the system-generated /photo/PhotoLibrary shared space ONLY works if you drag and drop/upload while in the Timeline View. If you happen to be in the Folder View at the time of upload, it dumps your uploads into the currently-displayed folder, which if you're just getting started, is the root-level All Photos folder. Worse yet, it ditches any sub-folders that might be part of the upload, lumping everything together in one big pile. The software developer in me understands the logic, but it should absolutely have a warning/confirmation when viewing that top-level folder that uploads dropped here will be unsorted when the dust settles.
the Remote Backup is really slow Compare when Backing up on the Local Network !! my internet is 500Mbps but still slow
So if I have all my photos backed up to synology and I get a new iphone how would I restore all the photos back to my new phone? Also, would there be any consequences for doing this such as loss of quality or loss of live photo etc...?
Hello! How can I add a folder with photos from the NAS to the Photos application without duplicating it? Thanks!
I made the mistake of not using the default folder structure for mobile backup and just dumped all my iphones photos and videos into a single folder. Any easy fix or would it be best to delete the folder and start the process over?
I've watched and looked into different NAS drives. The issue I have with the Synology and many others is Admin being able to see photos of every user. In a family set up. Is there a way of not seeing the photos? I get you can see the folder but for privacy don't want one user to be able to see the photos
Can the People directory and facial recognition in shared space work without giving everyone administrator rights to Synology Photos? this is a big security issue.
How can I switch the Backup from New Pictures to All Pictures?
Hello Will, thanks for the tutorial! One question though: When I was organizing the People Album, there was some pictures that weren't correctly identified, so I removed them from the people album, but now when I access those photos, there is no way to reassign to another person. It seems that you can do the reassign to a new person when you detect it was wrongly identified, but if you remove it, there is no way to "retag" it again. Any suggestion?
I have the same question.
@@PNW_KT I've been in the Synology webpage and it seems it is not possible to do what we need, but there is a workaround. Download the photos you need to tag, delete them from the NAS and then do the upload again. The Synology will process them again as it were different new photos.
i have 2 non administrative users however i could not get the peoples album (facial recognision) for it. can someone help?
Hey Will. I am wondering how does Bob access Synology Photos via web browser when not on the LAN?
Why my retouch photo in LR do not show in Synology. Photo? Thanks for your help.
Thanks Will. Always a great tutorial! Quick question on Synology Photos... I'm looking at migrating a heap of old photos on some external HDD's into my new DS923+.. I'm keen to be able to use the Synology Photos display/sharing functions.. What is the best/easier way to copy across 2tb of images... Directly into photos via mapped drive? I've tried a test however when copying direct into the mapped 'photos' drive, they are visible in file manager however I can't see them in the Synology Photos App! Thanks in advance
any solution for HEVC not playing on synologh photos web? (other than uploading from mobile app)
How can I do that if it's not shown to me. I have an old ds110j. I can't install true internet due to synology completely erased this packages from the net.
How can I get all my 48K images off of iCloud? They make it impossible except one at a time...
why would you want to trust a phone more than a NAS for a master data storage of photos? or do you mean icloud? if not on an iphone you dont have to store your photos in some public cloud so to use a NAS for this instead of your phone that breaks or gets lost feels like the whole point of a NAS? really confusing take.
Once you upload your iphone photos to your NAS via the photos app and delete them from the iphone, I see it retains live photo option in the photos app from synology but is there a way to re-save it back to the iphone native photos folder so you can go in and edit the portrait depth of field options or live photo? If not then I don't see the benefit of offloading them.
i would like to ask a question: do we need the DS file and Drive to have photos saved from my mobile? what's their use?
Do you guys use folders or you create albums from folders ? Dont know which path to take
Grazie! Questo è proprio un ottimo video. Faccio molta fatica perchè non conosco l'inglese però l'hai fatto talmente bene che riguardandolo più volte arrivo a capire tutto. Grazie complimenti.
Ho tantissime foto fatte negli anni, ho vari backup sopratutto di imac che hanno creato un po di confusione nel tempo sopratutto con whatsapp. Vorrei fare pulizia trovando e cancellando anche i duplicati con nome diverso o con estensione diversa, Potresti consigliarmi qualcosa? In ogni caso grazie. ciao
Is there a way to add a existing folders? I can in video station, why not photos? I'm I missing something?
Is there any app for video storage and sharing like this or can you use this and just lose the facial recognition??
Why can’t I just move photos from my personal space to the shared space and Synology automatically moves it at the correct place in the folder structure? This will end up in a mess if different family members share photos. Or did I miss something?
Interested to hear if anyone has a strategy for this.
Hi great video ,I made a union of 2 peoples and ,I wanted to cancel it ,how can I do it Thanks
Thanks for the video Will, well explained and really useful. I'm having an issue though; when importing old photos & videos (like 6-7 years old), some of the video's won't play and I'm getting the error: "File cannot be displayed due to a conversion failure". The strange thing is, the format is I believe compatible (like .MOV or .MTS files) and this does not happen for all video's. I tried re-indexing, but this didn't help. Do you have any idea what this could be? Thanks!
0:00 - 0:01 what noise was that? what was happening there? it sounded like "ooiu oiu you"
anyone have problems with logging in on the ios app? I can't login at all...
do you set up photos on a admin account or normal non admin account? thanks
Should I activate snapshots for the shared photos folder?
Wow, idk what I would do without these tutorials. Thank you!
How does Photos handle video files created on your phone? And how does it handle Live Photos?
It handles vidoes just fine. Live photos are stored as an image as well as a video
You cannot view some video/sound formats in the browser but they are indexed.
How can I view videos….. ?
Will, great video, extremely useful. Thank you so much. Once I share a photo/video from my personal space to the shared space, does it create another copy of the same photo/video, or is it just a shortcut to the original file?
And is there an option to back up family phones staight to shared folder so all family photos are all in 1 place?
No. Ir moves the photo, so you have to remember which one you put it in or search in two different places for it. Dumbest thing ever.
17:46 I wish the default share option was to allow downloads.
How can I add folders with photos to NAS