I bought a Synology NAS specifically to store my photos and it’s been a steep learning curve on how to manage it. Your videos have been a huge help - thank you!!!
Will is the best at this stuff! He helped me get set-up with on-site and off-site solutions. I went a little nuts with it once Will told me how to do it. So much power and flexibility. I still use DropBox to deliver files to clients, but all my data is stored here. About 80TB so far. Go Will!
Looking forward to this series. As an amateur photographer I purchased a 2 Bay DS220J to store my files. I've struggled getting the optimum set up. I use your videos but would ask that if possible keep it simple. Implied knowledge leaves old fuddies like me scratching around to understand. (I used to say " imagine your teaching your gran" )🤣😅 Keep up the good work.
Cant wait for the Lightroom series. I recently got a DS1522+ and am struggling to determine what the most optimal workflow is for me given I need to download files from Dropbox, build them into a a catalog by event with smart previews, and then distribute to editors. Thus far I have been downloading from Dropbox to my M2 NVME drive locally, building into a catalog with smart previews, then once that's done I transfer the RAW to the Synology and then export as JPEG once I get the edited catalog returned while the RAW remain on the Synology. It seems not as fast as using the NVME currently, but I am only using a 1Gb connection which will be upgraded to 2.5Gb next week when I get the 10Gb Expansion card. If I notice I am bottlenecking on network speed during export I may have to also upgrade my desktop NIC to 10Gb as well.
Thanks for this video! Quick question though a little off topic. If you buy a 920+ now, how long could I expect to keep getting software updates ( like 7.2) or others? Thanks!!
So if you are looking for feature updates (like 7.2) then ~ 2028. If you are looking at security updates it’s a whole lot longer (dsm 6.2 is still getting security updates)
@@SpaceRexWill nice! So even if its a couple of years old hardware, im still getting at least 5 more years of support. That's great! Thanks for the reply. Love the content and I don't even have one yet!
I'd love to see a video on using the new on demand sync for Mac using Synology Drive - I tried it but Im not sure what happens when you click on a folder rather than a file and what happens if there is a folder nested inside another folder? A video would be great.
Agree - it's a great tool for photogs. Curious about your comments regarding mixing drives of various sizes. I was under the impression that all drives should be identical. Is this not the case? If, for example, one of my four 10TB WD Reds fails, can I replace it w/ any size and brand?
I believe your impression is correct for standard RAID, or rather, you can mix drive sizes, but they will be treated as if you had multiples of the smallest drive. For example, if you had 1, 2, 3 and 4 TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration, your total space available would be just 1+1+1=3 TB. But this video recommends SHR 1 instead (Synology Hybrid RAID 1, based on RAID 5 from what I understand), in which case you would get 1+2+3=6 TB (the largest drive being the "cost" as mentioned in the video).
Maybe it's an archaic solution, but I'm using a mapped drive on Synology and Picasa on my client computer. Indexing in Picasa is the fastest I've seen so far.
I tether from my Canon R5 to a computer and SSD today but would like to 1) tether to the computer and NAS and 2) have the jpeg captured photos real-time auto update the Synology photos share and be available to anyone in the studio on their mobile devices. Right now I'm looking at doing a Dropbox link to make this happen via Dropbox but I would rather have this in the NAS. The key functionality here is auto update real-time hands free so people in the studio can see results off the camera immediately.
I've still not upgraded my DS918+ to DSM7 because the whole geolocation updating is completely missing from Synology Photos, so I'm still running Photostation
Thank you for the great videos! Please, what 2 bay Synology Nas do you recommend I pick up? One that supports 2.5GbE and possibly an nvme SSDs as well that with drives all together will be under $500-700 🙏
I'm using a 4-bay Raid-10 with a 10gbe connection, and I've noticed that thumbnails load slower than expected (specifically in Photo Mechanic). Would you recommend adding a m.2 cache to the raid to solve this?
Hello thanks for your videos. I have one question I am thinking of buying an empty Synology Nas (DS220+) and buying 2 différents brands for the HDD. Do you advice to combine brands or better to stay with the same brand and buy them from different sellers ?
Hi there, I have a small question, my synology UI is not as fast and smooth like yours. Is it because of the Synology device which is a DS216se? I always observe CPU usage at 100%. Will changing a synology device improves the UI interface? I am not complaining on the transfer speed of the files to the drive and vice versa. However, its more to how snappy and fluid the IU of synology DSM is. Mine is slow and not as fast as you show in the video. Will Ds720+ work way better in this case? If its about the same then no point for me to upgrade Hope this question could be answered. I asked here as well in the most latest photo hoping that it would be answered.
I have a simple question. Would you advise that the photo app in the Synology NAS be used as a video Content Management System to share video clips locally and remotely much like Kyno? Thanks!
I would be surprised if there isn't an open source Video CMS out there that you can run on the Synology if you want to do it properly. But you probably need to get into things like Docker to make that work. Unless you know what Docker is, you will probably be better off using Synology Photos :)
Should I have my RAW files in Synology photos or just my edited jpg files? Should I have my RAW files in Synology Drive and jpg files in Synology photos (I just bought a Synology, and trying to figure it out)
If you have a two drive NAS with the drives synced. Can you increase storage by adding a larger drive to one of the bays or do both drives need to be the same size.
Great video, thanks. I am considering buying a Synology Nas, like a DS1522+ or a DS920+ . But could I buy one 16 gb hard drive to start with. And maybe next year add a second 16 gb hard drive, and later add additional hard drives. And start with RAID 1 and later change to RAID 5.
I think you can just use SHR1 as recommended in the video. So you'll get no redundancy at first, then one drive redundancy when you add more drives one by one.
I don't think DSM will allow you the option of RAID1 without a minimum of 2 drives. Not sure about SHR, but I wouldn't consider any one disk solution to be of much value - it's essentially a single point of failure. Better off getting 2x8TB and expand from there. If you use SHR, at some point in the future when all drive bays are full and you need more space, you can remove an 8, put in say, a 16 and you volume will expand accordingly. You can then take the 8, stick it in an external enclosure, connect it to one of the USB ports at the back and use it as an additional drive. DSM has tools that allow you to backup data to an external drive with relative ease.
I’ve noticed when sharing files using Photos the share link doesn’t work when using DDNS. It doesn’t include the port number (…:5001) in the path and I have to manually type it in the link. It’s not a problem using Quickconnect, but I prefer to use DDNS.
@@SpaceRexWill big props to Synology support. They responded very quickly to my support ticket and after several communications back-and-forth and even remoting into my NAS, we found the problem. Turns out if you have an application alias set up (login portal in the control panel) for photos and you use DDNS, the alias will overwrite the URL for the shared links. Since the alias doesn’t contain the port number, it won’t show up in the shared link. Disabling the alias for the Photos app fixed it. They were very helpful even though I’m just a home user with a DS920+.
I’m looking for a nas to store my Capture One Sessions. Anyone knows if it will work? I mean will I be able to open and work on that session files from my mac?
Do you have recommendations for online backups for NAS? I have a Synology and use iDrive to back up after (at the time maybe not now) Carbonite stopped supporting NAS backups. SO far iDrive has been good but I always look at other options that might be better as things change with time. Thanks.
Yeah, I am still working a full time job (plus doing consulting every week) so I dont get a ton of time to film. I try to have a backlog of ~6 videos just in case
@@unknownKnownunknowns the biggest is that you cannot store your catalog on the network share, only the photos. But the catalog can easily exceed 100GB if you have lots of previews. So if you have lots of photos, this can be quite problematic. But there are quite a few other quirks too. Some of which may be considered to be bugs, and some are just inconvinenences. For example, the latest lightroom classic has trouble backing up libraries to a network storage location. This is a bug. The windows recycle bin and mac trash does not integrate with SMB deletes, so deleting photos do not behave quite "natively." It's not clear what priority the network share use case is for Adobe, as some of these issues are longstanding.
And this talk about Synology Photos in the video is really quite misleading given Lightroom's problems. Because no matter how good Synology Photos is, it's not Lightroom. (And in fact I wouldn't even rate Synology Photos above Google Photos.)
