Synology Photos

At its core, this does what it is supposed to do: back up your photos to your NAS. If you are starting from scratch, all new media will upload, with image previews generated on the fly. It is slick and works wonderfully. HOWEVER, if you are migrating an existing library of media, prepare for frustration. I migrated from iCloud and added 50,000+ photos and videos to the NAS. The image assistant does its thing and generates previews and thumbnails for past photos and videos as described, but at the expense of usability. I am unable to browse my own photo library without encountering long, unresponsive pauses, sometimes as long as 5 to 10 seconds while image assistant works in the background. Perhaps a focused image assistant mode for this app is in order? At the moment it only generates previews while the app is open, the app is nigh unresponsive when it is generating, and the screen locks per iPhone settings which I believe halts further generation. I'd prefer a way that I can leave my device working overnight for however long it takes so I can use this app to browse my photos smoothly without the constant freezing. Side note: Image assistant on my m1 mbp was generating white thumbnails randomly. Without a way to force regeneration, I had to wipe the whole transfer and transfer the whole set back to the nas again. This means I only trust my iOS devices to do this task. This hasn't been a smooth transition and I hope the situation improves with updates.

I’m a as much as a Synology fan boy as anyone but this program is just sub par. Firstly I set a custom backup location and then with each iOS app update( I suspect) it defaults back to my personal space and all my photos are now in some random folder that I have to hunt down and then move to my 2023 folder. All it’s got to do is take the photos from my iPhone and put em on my NAS but then when I used the app to show my pals some photos I just get blank images, come on I have a 1/2 TB iPhone and set to unlimited cache and it still randomly decides to down load all my photos or sometimes not. On mobile I don’t need a 48 Megapixel photo just a bloody 100k thumbnail would do but mostly my photos are MIA when I need to show some of my English friends a picture of my cat! Sometimes the UI works and shows folder view then sometimes it doesn’t. I’m on the latest M1 hardware, newish iPhone 14 Pro and it just seems to be a pain to use. Just give me a simply program that can download all my photos 50k to my phone with little thumbnails so I can show my pals a picture of my cat! We don’t need all this sharing, AI recognition, moments stuff - just get the basics to WORK! I suggest reassigning the current team to another project and get some new folks onboard - to just get the basics working!

Synology had a lot of room for improvement in their photo offering. While synology photos does appear to fix some things with synology photo station. Some things never change and remain broken. My biggest gripe about photo station still seems to persist with synology photos. The upload/backup process and everything it involves. Just like photo station the app and server just seem to randomly stop backing up photos from your device. The only thing that that they did improve was when it does break it actually knows what photos you backed up previously. So you won’t end up with 1.2M photo duplicates you have to sort through. So that’s a big step forward. But the photo backup process in synology photos still breaks, and breaks often. With synology photos, the upload queue and completed queue are completely blank. Like what? It’s been in this broken state for 6 months now. When I’m in the app it’s indicating that it’s backing up to the user but both queues are empty. Poor user experience just like synology photo station. My second biggest gripe, is photo ordering by folder. Just like photo station, synology photos dumps all your photo backups into one folder on your nas. If you have your photo folder organized by year month date, good luck with that. You’re left with either using the slow process of the synology photo UI to move pictures one by one. Or having to install another third party program to organize your photos. Which is almost like just not using synology photos at all. Tags for photo organizing is one thing, but that’s independent upon a piece of software. I’d much rather organize my photos by folder and not tags.