Synology Photos 4+

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.

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.

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.