Synology Photos 4+

An OK alternative to Google Photos

I understand that nobody can beat Google’s AI but the UX of the app is not that great either.
As a backup service it’s plenty, but no dark mode, no backup only while charging, adding tags and manually tagging faces is cumbersome within the app. I would also like an option to delete the photo from local storage if deleted within the synology app! Very cumbersome to remember delete a photo in two places… make it work like Google photos!
I bought a NAS for photo and video backup! I would love to recommend more folks to get a synology, but it’s difficult when even a tech savvy person like me finds it hard to use.

Developer Response ,

Hello prediscover, Thanks for the valuable feedback and feature request. The mentioned feature is one of the possible enhancements in future updates. We’ll forward it to development teams and discuss it further internally.

Great, but needs “moments”

I LOVE that this app auto backs up my photos instantly, but one major feature it’s missing is something similar to iOS moments. I really like seeing the moments the iOS photos app creates with the photo collages with music. My phone is almost out of space from all the photos and videos but I’m hesitant to hit the free up space in this app because it’s gonna wipe everything off my phone and I’ll no longer get the occasional moments from iOS photos. Or even integrate this app with iOS photos so it can read the pics off the nas and do all the leg work just have the nas as the source folder. Another nice feature would be if we could choose to only delete photos from our phone that’s older than 6 months or a year.

The auto backup did save me a few months ago when I lost my phone. It has ALL my pics with my kids and I hadn’t looked in a long time to see if the auto backup had been doing it’s job, so I panicked and jumped on my computer right away and lo and behold, all my photos were there on the nas like they were supposed to be. That changed my situation from losing priceless photos to only being out a few hundred bucks for my phone.

Developer Response ,

Hello Aaaaaaattttrrreeesddfg, Thank you for the valuable feedback and feature request. We’ll forward it to development teams and discuss it further internally.

Great but few things can make it amazing

Recently switched from GP to my Synology NAS. I am very happy with how everything has turned out and a lot of the native features. Of course, Google has a couple extra features but some are not 100% necessary for me. Few things I would LOVE to see in future updates: -Removing Duplicate Photos -Add folders based on a face (to be shared). i would love for my wife to see the kids photos but not every photo (works well on Google) -Facial recognition for pets? Works well on Google -Background adding of photos with app refresh on (doesn’t seem to upload without app open, but maybe my issue) Overall, still love it! So many pros. I love being able to keep my content ‘raw’ and not overally optimized where it loses its quality. Most of these reviews are from users who don’t know how to properly setup the NAS (QuickConnect for example) but for those who understand setup, it’s not bad. I use both GP and this but prefer this for raw content.