Synology Photos 4+

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.

Look elsewhere - basics don’t work

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!

Developer Response ,

Hello, sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. To help us further investigate the situation, please submit a support ticket here: https://account.synology.com/support/create/ticket
Our support engineers will get back to you shortly. Thank you.

Doesn’t upload all my photos

For the past year or so I’ve noticed it’s not uploading all the photos. It will upload some photos, but only about a quarter each day. There’s no use in a photo backup app that doesn’t back up all the photos. I have zero confidence that this is protecting my work. I spent several weeks migrating all my photos to my Synology server, and it was a mistake. I now have ~16,000 photos. This app lacks the features to adequately organize that number of photos. I have dozens of albums and hundreds of tags and they’re all in a flat list. I need to be able to put albums in albums and categorize tags. I also need to be able to see what photos aren’t tagged and to see and edit tags on photos more easily. Right now it takes half a dozen clicks for each photo. I also need to see the aspect ratio from the thumbnail. With all squares I can’t tell which photos are vertical and which are horizontal. The star ratings system is useless. You can’t search or sort on it and the only way to see it is to view individual files information. I had high hopes of being able to store and organize my high resolution photos on my own NAS but still have them accessible to all my devices. This just isn’t working.