This is awesome!!! Thank you for creating this video! I’ve been considering a Google Photos alternative, and have been considering the a Synology NAS for awhile. This has been so helpful!
I have the DS 918+ 16Tb of storage, yes initially it's expensive but it's all yours, I just downloaded the new beta release and it comes with Synology Photos, it's excellent just like G photos, highly recommended
Thanks for your great explanation. I was always a WD cLoud user and since WD no longer provides my cloud with security updates, you convinced me to buy a Synology NAS. The Synologyy Photos is really great. I also copied all of my photos from Google Photos to my own cloud 2 years ago because I was afraid that Google Photos would not be free for much longer. Thanks for your great video. Greetings from Austria Vienna
My question is I am setting up my nas for the first time and have two many photos on my Mac in iPhoto. I mend to off load photos as my internal hard on my computer is almost full. So do I move them from iPhoto to synology photos or just build file folders and store them there?
I was wondering if you've discovered how sharing photos with friends could work on a smartphone. It used to be the case that sharing an album forced people to download the app. Is this still the case? And another question, is it easy to create a folder in which people who don't have an account can upload photos to? So for example if you have a bunch of friends who took photos of a holiday, they can all easily upload them to one folder?
Great video. I have been using moments and just upgraded to DSM 7 on my DS920 20tb. Am considering hosting a few family members/ friends just for fun. wish I could have afforded a larger nas at the time!
I have a review video coming. I've been holding off hoping DSM 7 would come out of beta but it looks like it will remain in beta until summer of this year. So far I notice no issues at all. It's very stable.
You did not explain how you got your photos out of Google. Can you please make a follow up? I’ve had lots of issues with this and the Google takeout route.
has always been a great thing with the DS Photo, what I honestly and also my users on the Synology miss is the missing miniatures in the view "folder view" as soon as it is more than a subordinate. It was very practical when someone added a new picture with the mobile app, e.g. in the fifth of the depth (this is folder // Photo / Reisen / Ostsee / Cuxhaven / new picture) appeared in the first folder as a new miniature . Synology Photo doesn't even have miniatures in the icon folder if it goes deeper than an order. Too bad.
Good timing. Just ordered my Synology last week. Trying to create the perfect workflow using Photo Mechanic to cull and send to Synology. Any idea if Synology Photos will / can combine JPG and RAW when presenting images in UI?
Great video 👍🏻 however I am not sure if I have missed it but I think you have not finally explained how to download the photos from Google Photos and keep the metadata.
@@jeradtech please make a guide! I bought a synology nas, but now I can' migrate my pictures from Google. Also I have a previous version of DMS, how did you get DMS 7? Is it safe to use?
I will have my full review soon and will elaborate on photo migration. You do have to run the beta to get the version of Synology Photos I am running. I have been running beta for over a month now and it's very solid.
@@jeradtech please be very detailed with the photo migration process. I have Years of pictures to migrate and I don't know how to do. Also, I didn't find a good "beginner proof" guide out there. If you do this right you'll get tons of views I suspect!
The best I've found so far is to use Google Takeout and have it send the backup to a Dropbox account. Unzip the archives on your computer then upload them to the Synology.
I just upgraded the DSM on my DS1819+ last night to DSM 7. I downloaded the android app to my phone for Synology Photos. The app seems to work fine from my phone. The main time I use my phone to take photos is usually a spur-of-the-moment opportunity. Usually when I don't have my DSLR camera with me. Do you think Synology will make a desktop/laptop app that will make it easier to upload photos to the NAS? I currently have my NAS set up as mapped drives but I think it would be much easier to handle the upload through a dedicated app. I still use Google's old app called Picasa that they discontinued being able to upload through it directly to Google Photos. It still works great for doing minor editing. When I'm out taking photos it is usually with a DSLR camera, so when I return I offload the SD cards to my laptop or the desktop for editing.
I was so frosted that they started charging for it that I downloaded everything I had uploaded and left. Will definitely not be relying on Google for anything unless 100% necessary. Thanks a lot wow.
Did I miss the part where you talked about how you extracted your photos/videos from Google at the original resolution with the metadata intact? You mentioned this around the 2:00 mark. Apologies if so!
I had a giant library on Google photos (from Android) and the only way I found was to download the entire library in separate packages; however... all my photos downloaded with a screwed metadata :( most of them got set to a single specific date (Nov 12th, 2020), so i had to throw them into one folder.
@@hispeed8500 Yes! Google takeout is the thing I used, I got a download link for like 10 different zip packages... Unfortunately, Google messes up and doesn't organize anything by any folder, just throws files in the packages (in part 1 you can find files from yesterday and from 2 years ago lol). Not sure by what you mean merging my metadata? Google takeout kinda screwed up and modified most of my photos' metadata into one date which gave me a big headache lol
@@antonk5414 by metadata, I mean the information tied to each photo like geolocation, camera, resolution, date, etc. To my understanding, Google takeout compresses file size and removes metadata from the original files, putting them into separate JSON files. You then would have to merge each JSON file to each photo/video file to have that data intact. The biggest deal to me is the timestamp.
@@hispeed8500 Yeah I just checked my Google photos, and the photos that were correctly exported by Google, do have all the metadata embedded (Device model, color space, F, exposure, latitute, longitude, etc) and the right date. But the photos that were wrongly exported with the date merged into one, don't have any metadata :( and they didnt come with a json file either...
With Google Photos and my iPhone, it seems that I have to open the google photos app to have the auto backup begin. Do I have to do this with photo station?
Great informative video mate!. So you could be feeding one photo library in the NAS from multiple devices (iOS and Android) just by using your same user account in the apps within those devices? or does the app restrict the user login to one instance? Thanks!
This was a very great and thorough video!!! Thank you!! Quick question though, I already have my photo library backup in my NAS (2 TB) organized by folder name, date, etc... Is there a way to import the photos into the Synology Photos without having it to duplicate everything in a new folder directory? I just did a test with the version 6 (as the 7 isn't out yet) and it copies all my photos into a new folder volume, I'd like to avoid that since it eats up my storage with duplicate files (plus it doesn't maintain the directory structure from what I noticed). Thanks!
Yes Synology Photos under DSM 7 let's you keep your existing folder structure, so you end up with both a folder based view and and timeline plus album groupings
@@antonk5414 Not sure if I'm understanding your question correctly, but I'm using a shared photo location based on a shared base folder called "photo" and any folders created under that are visible to Synology Photos. Does that help?
Thanks for the informative video! I have a question about the sharing within the app. Would it work similarly to Google Photos when it comes to sharing my entire photo library with my wife? Right now we both upload all our photos to the same place and then can see each other’s photos. And then in addition to that I can create shared albums. Would it works the same with Synology?
Can two different Google Photos users... use the same Synology Photos app? I am considering buying a Synology NAS for my husband and I but am not sure if we both can utilize Synology photos from two different Google accounts?
My guess is that you used quickconnect to be able to share your pictures with your mother for example. Can you do video on how you did it exactly with the account , the phone app and so on ? I think that the new photo app use a separate home folder for each user but you can also use a shared folder for all family member like Google photo can enable. I plan to do a setup like yours for my wife and 2 kids + an account for my parents.
You dhould do a video of how to use it for real case scenarios. I found it rather difficult to understand. Especially how to set up the security for different users.
The list below has been updated now. See - kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Which_Synology_NAS_models_support_the_facial_recognition_feature_on_Synology_Photos I have a DS418 and facial recognition is working fine.
Love my synology but to get to a Google alternative is a lot extra work settings up. Quickconnect is sloooow since it proxies through synology servers so you need some form of ddns ( lots of isps don't support it ) or your own static IP. And you should spent a couple days setting up the security settings since the Internet is filled with bad people see the latest qlocker. Now when this is all set up its kinda magical. Tons of space and the speed is also great and you can add plex. But to run it properly is a ton of work.
This sounds great from a privacy perspective but if you considering security, that's not a great idea. I would trust google more to keep my data secure than Synology and their services. You really have to know what you're doing if you're running a local server.
Thumbs Up. Good review. But, raid is not backup. Someone steals the NAS, natural disaster (fire, water, etc.), dog chews power cord, baby pours favorite juice on the NAS makes a very bad situation of possibly no recovery. Encryption and duplicate NAS to backup to offsite (friend/relative) should at least be a one or two sentence mention in this video for what you're proposing. Most items in your house are replaceable, your data is not.