Synology Moments 4+

This app is a necessity if you want to sort through thousands of photos on an iPhone. DS photo is horrible when you’re trying to find a phone from years ago and you don’t know exactly when it was taken. But the ability to look through lots of photos easily is one of the only good things about it. You still need DS Photo to actually organize your photos into folders.

What Moments Needs:
PASSWORD PROTECTION - This is an absolute must and it’s the only Synology app that doesn’t have it. This needs to be added immediately to protect the photos.

Ability to separate photos by albums. Having all photos lumped together is great until you have multiple family members saving photos which leads to lots of viewing redundancy.

Facial recognition needs a lot of work. It doesn’t recognize people from different photo sets.

Ability to change the “badge photo” for people. It chooses the absolute worse photos and there’s no rhyme or reason. I don’t want an infant photo to display for a child that’s now ten years old.

You need to run both DS Photo and Moments for full function on an iPhone. If it wasn’t for the fact that I can easily search through photos I wouldn’t use Moments at all. It makes a mess of things in general.

I upload photos from previous years in its entirety and consider this more of a place to archive all photos other than the current year and works fine. For example I have all photos up to 2020 and when 2021 is complete I will upload in its entirety. Kind of like tax returns. Yes it’s a little clunky here and there but having all your photos over 10 years is kind of cool.

I then just use iCloud for just the current year and pay 3 a month for the simplicity of the apple photos app but not paying 10 a month for their high tier. Seriously apple needs to get with the times with cloud space. I just want all my photos in one place without having to pay $120 a year. But using two apps is I guess the next best thing.

I’m generally pleased with the app and the integration with my NAS, but it fails to auto-backup the camera roll unless you open the app. This makes me have to think about my backup. Would love to see this just happen like so many other photo backup apps do. I often go weeks before I remember that I’ve taken photos and that I haven’t opened this app.

Otherwise it’s been great for viewing and getting media off my phone and iPad.