Synology Photos - Photo organization & storage

Oh, the app is awesome! It reminds me of Google Photos but without all those fancy editing options and such. I absolutely adore how it backs up my phone photos automatically. Upgraded from DS215j to DS224+, and whoa, the pictures load super quickly now. Setting up separate accounts for each family member, choosing custom backup spots, and tweaking views - it's jam-packed with features. Been using it for years and still totally smitten!

Imagine a wonderful app that's like Google Photos. Sounds great, right? But there are two things that stop it from getting a perfect score. One, you can only see photos and videos that have been backed up. This means you can't see new pictures right away. Two, it doesn't use its own video player. Fast forward to 2024 - these problems are fixed for iPhone and one is fixed for Android. So now, it's a 5-star app! 😉

The app has become terrible. Even with 500 words, I can't cover all its issues. After the recent update, it started backing up my deleted photos. Video quality is poor, especially when viewing them. Videos don't show in map view under "places". I get randomly logged out sometimes. Casting to Chromecast is at 1280p quality with 30 FPS video. Face matching is unreliable and object searching is minimal. There are no smart albums.

This photo app isn't as advanced as iCloud or Google Photos, but it's good for me! It has the basic stuff I want like a nice interface, automatic backup of my phone photos, and the ability to share photos with my wife. I'll give it 4 stars because there are some things that can be better: - Links sometimes don't work for non-admin users (might be my NAS setup) - Facial recognition could be improved even though it's already pretty good.

Oh no, the recent update for DS Photos is a step back! Why would it default to a personal space instead of showing all my photos? I can't even see the folders where my photos are saved. And the backups keep stopping randomly, needing to be reinitialized. I'm not even sure if my videos are backing up properly, I'll have to check on that. I really hope Synology doesn't make any more upgrades if this is how they're going to work from now on. Upgrades shouldn't get rid of important features for users like me.

Adding a year/date slider to the album would really simplify browsing through photos. Jumping to a specific date/year can be quite tricky without it!

I have a love-hate relationship with this app. It's clumsy and not dependable. It often disconnects without warning and disables backups randomly. The paths to save files are messy, making it hard to add new ones. Specifying options for certain folders is unreliable. Overall, it's terrible and has turned my photo backup into a disaster. Be cautious when changing your default photo path, as the app can confuse you with multiple file paths. It's accurate but not very smart.

Oh, that app is just terrible! You know, I log in and set it to sync, and then all I get are these failed login messages on the NAS from my phone. It's crazy! And after a while, the app gives up, like, after a month or so. But if I try logging in again, I see more failed attempts on the NAS each day until the app finally gives up once more. Something's not right, you know? It just can't seem to remember my login properly after the first time. Ugh, frustrating!

I was really excited to switch from Google Photos to self-hosting. I got a Synology NAS (920+) just for this. But when I installed Photos, I found out it couldn't use my existing folder structure... What a disappointment! If you've been organizing photos in folders for years and move that structure to the new NAS, Synology Photos can't recognize it. You have to put all your photos together in a root folder created by the app. This is not acceptable for a professional NAS like Synology. It should be able to scan multiple folders for content. I hope the developers fix this quickly. I can't review the rest of the app because I can't even upload photos. I'm worried about how it will work. I'll update my review when users can use their own folder structures with the app.

So far, everything has been great! I really hope there can be a viewer to look at photos directly on the device instead of only seeing the uploaded ones. When I'm out and take pictures, I have to use the phone's default gallery instead of having everything in one place. Being able to view all photos, even those not yet uploaded, would make it a complete alternative to Google Photos.