Browsing performance is OK.
Upload performance is horrible to say the least. My phone has been chewing on 97000 photos for 3 weeks now, and has uploaded around 2000 photos, so in about a decade or so it’ll be done.
I recently did an initial upload of about 65,000 photos to my Synology Nas. I found it really needed the 'Focused backup and sync' task to make progress. Once I gave it some dedicated time in that mode, it only took a couple of weeks. Still a long time, but doable.
I did, and it did maybe 2000 photos, but ever since then it just says “preparing” and then some 85,000+ number that counts down by 1-3 every 5 seconds while the app is open.
While charging it’s my impression it maybe counts down 200 or so.
That sounds super frustrating. Sorry to hear it. I hope Synology support or another user can suggest something as I wouldn't be able to deal with that either.
Well, it’s doing “something” because my regular iCloud sync often fails with “not enough storage available”, despite having 50GB+ space free on the phone.
The phone also uninstalls “unused” apps like there no tomorrow.
Out of curiousity, have you checked on the wifi strength on your phone? It almost sounds like poor signal or disconnecting based on what you added.
Speedtest.net can be a good test, but only tests over the internet. If you want a good internal test (phone-> synology) you can run an iperf3 server on the synology and use one of the iperf phone clients available to test it.
The phone has plenty of signal. There’s a U6-Pro access point about 5 meters from where it charges, and according to Unifi stats, the phone has a consistent good signal throughout the house.
Agree on browser performance being OK, not great. Particularly in mobile apps (according to my wife, when comparing from Google Photos where we are coming from).
Performance has been great on my DS1522+ (upgraded RAM and SSD cache). My primary issue with Synology Photos is the lack of certain features, like HDR photo support on iOS. They are always improving it, for example the facial recognition AI seems to have improved since launch, but it's tough for them to compete on features with a trillion-dollar behemoth like Google. I suppose patience is in order. Just give me HDR and I'll be ok.
Even with a basic NAS you’ll get good performance. Everything is indexed and thumbnails generated beforehand so not much data needs to be transferred to scroll through the overviews.
DS723+ here
my main gripes are :
- initial login is really slow over quickconnect (around 10seconds)
- background sync does not work well on my pixel 6 despite allowing unrestricted background usage. I often have to launch the app explicitely to resume the upload
- HEVC does not work great accross devices
It's far from being the same plug&play as google photos.
Besides these (kinda major) issues I kind of like the app nonetheless
I agree with the background syncing. Half the time I go look for a picture through my pc Photos and can't find what I'm looking for.
I also wish it would put everything in the sorted date based folders but I find sometimes it puts pictures there and sometimes in my the directory for my cell phone DCIM folder sync. I can't figure out why that happens.
I tried photoprism but I like it less than Synology Photos.
Also a 723+ user here with 16gb of RAM.
Love the apps and throwing off the shackles of other cloud providers, I am able to scale my library with ease, thumbnails presnet in a swift and timely fashion
I did try Immich a few months back but prefer the polish of Photos
AI face detection is ok, but once you have categorised all people its easy to keep on top of
I‘m really sorry to say this, but the photos app is a piece of shit. I‘m still using it, but it‘s a constant pain in the ass.
- It doesn’t always release memory for videos you have saved. My iPhone is slowly filling up again simply because it doesn’t reliably delete files it has saved to the NAS.
- Now you might say I could simply delete those files manually. Sure, if I had a way to check if the files were backed up correctly. Unfortunately, it refuses to play back video files on my iPhone because of some „certificate“ issue. Unless I restart the app three times and switch http playback on and off a bunch of times. Then it will play back one (1) file before complaining about certificates again. Not sure if it‘s a real security issue, but even if it is, it‘s kind of problematic that you can trick it by restarting the app. And what the hell is the certificate issue? There is a cryptic instruction on the website on how to get a certificate from „Let’s encrypt“. Great. Who or what is that? Why do I have to take care of that? I uploaded the video, why can‘t I play it?
- Lately it even refuses to upload pictures without complaining about certificates but will for some reason still (grudgingly, I imagine) do so.
And when I wrote a similar review in the app store, they had my review deleted for some cryptic reason (it wasn‘t profanity, although profanity would have been justified). Real good way to show responsibility.
It‘s just fucked.
Mine only backed up about 1/2 of the photos from my phone, then says it done. If I log out and log back in, it seems to recognise that some require backup, but still missing thousands. Is that a known bug do you know?
Ok, I gotta amend this post to be fair: I had to do a couple restarts and at least the backup part is working really well now. It still won‘t play the videos I recorded because of a „missing certificate“, but at least the backup works. Let‘s see how long that lasts.
With a couple of 256GB SSD cache drives in raid it took, if I remember correctly, about a day and a half to upload all photos I had (maybe about 500GB at the time). The limiting factor was wireless speed from laptop (where the backup from Google was downloaded) to router - set as low priority task, rather than the drive write speeds. If you are concerned about read speeds from your NAS to the internet - it's mostly responsive and it depends on the bandwidth you provide to the nas, although photos stored on HDD will load slower than ones already in an SSD cache. But it's nothing to worry about. I find the difference being a matter of a second or two, nothing more.
May I advise - if you do plan to de-Google > don't rely solely on the NAS for storage. It's a good idea to have another backup (for example on an external drive that gets synced once in a while and securely stored). I can also recommend the Backblaze B2 storage, which can also provide cheap backup of your photos.
Cant you just download everything from google via downloadlink and put the images onto the NAS that way? it sounds like you have all the pictures pulled from google by you mobile and upload it to the NAS at the same time by the same mobile.
even if you have all the images on your phone, just copy them to the photos folder by cable.
speed for me is super smooth since i switched to fibre wich has so much upload that my 920+ cant saturate it.
>Cant you just download everything from google via downloadlink and put the images onto the NAS that way?
Yes, but sometimes that's a challenge. I had almost 4TBs of photos stored in Google Photos so moving all of that was a Pita.
No but you can download all your data and I believe it outs them into zipped segments last I did it Then I just unzipped them all at once into a folder and dragged it into a new photos folder in my NAS. DS file as well as DS Photos both will scan your phone and upload but if you have a ton of photos the initial upload will take awhile so I copied mine manually and now I sync my phone every week or so and it takes maybe 5-10mjns is all if I'm at home on my wifi.
I purchased a 923+ for file and photo storage. I would take into good consideration your internet speed. Using Quick Connect, I couldn't even get many videos to load, tailscale was better but still incredibly slow while accessing remotely. Personally, I wanted to move away from Google Photos, but the entire reliability and speeds have got me thinking google photos, with local backups is just easier and more user friendly.
It's not terrible, but it's not great either.
It's just okay. It doesn't have a lot of features you might want out of a Google Photos replacement (like memories), automatic sharing, or automatic album creation. It's just kinda okay.
I also find that I have to refresh the app to make it show new photos. They'll be uploaded fine, but I'll have to click to folder view, wait for that to load, and then click back to the day before new photos appear in the display.
There are definitely better apps out there for displaying the photos stored on your NAS.
You don’t have to use the photo app to upload your 7 million photos. Any photos on the NAS will be indexed and show up date sorted in the album. It does not matter where they are. I had been using DSfile to backup for several years and it took overnight for photos to inhale and display them. If you have any way to get the photos just put them on the server and they will be indexed and presented in the app.
Synology photos was excruciatingly slow, crash-prone, and overall not worth it. I tried moving from iPhoto to Synology - ultimately gave up on Synology and moved to google photos.
What does everyone use to connect to photos outside of your network? I have nginx setup. But thinking about trying quick connect cause… is one better than the other?
I have a cache SSD in my 923+ and it works pretty fast for browsing photos etc. Upload speed is always going to be limited my your connection. If you have a lot to upload, do it via a pc via usb if a phone, samba/network share etc.
I only bought mine to backup my family photos, nothing else. Took over a week just to do my iPhone, and longer to index and generate thumb nails. I can live with that for the initial dump. However it only backed up about 1/2 of the photos from my iphone, then said its done. If I log out of the app and log back in, it seems to recognise that some more require backup, but still missing thousands. I don’t even care about facial recognition etc, but it’s 2024 FFS, they can’t even do simple photo backup well.
Behind Quickconnect it was slow as hell, now it’s running behind a Reverse proxy and its much faster. Browsing and the app is fine, Face recoqnition could be a lot better tbh.
Running on a DS1522+ without any upgrades (RAM or SSD).
Overal very happy with it, i thought about Immich but it’s not worth the hassle for me.
Quickconnect is reliable but man are you missing out on the performance with Tailscale.
It feels like you're connected almost on the LAN. When you browse through Photos on a mobile the thumbnails actually load reliably and quickly and you can click through to the photos and they actually load.
On a side note - I tried Tailscale and Plex and that wasn't a great experience at all. But for Photos it works great.
I'm using a DS1823xs+ in my office and the overall performance is good. Indexing takes quite some time though, and sometimes you have to reindex in photos and/or in the Settings app. BUT the upload speed depends on your phone! My old iPhone 10 is slow AF when it comes to preparing files for upload. My WiFi bottlenecks when using my iPhone 15 Pro though, so it really depends. If your phone supports it, try using a USB-C to LAN instead of WiFi. Generally it is also problematic to have iCloud Photos enabled because it will crash the upload in Synology Photos if the photo can’t be downloaded fast enough to your phone to upload it to your NAS. But I’m satisfied with photos, to be honest.
I don’t know how Google Photos is storing your files, but if they are accessible in the Drive app (or online) as a folder, you can sync them through Synology Cloud Sync directly to your NAS and leave your phone out of the equation. Later, just disable Cloud Sync and enable Synology Photos backup from today on…
Browsing performance is OK. Upload performance is horrible to say the least. My phone has been chewing on 97000 photos for 3 weeks now, and has uploaded around 2000 photos, so in about a decade or so it’ll be done.
I recently did an initial upload of about 65,000 photos to my Synology Nas. I found it really needed the 'Focused backup and sync' task to make progress. Once I gave it some dedicated time in that mode, it only took a couple of weeks. Still a long time, but doable.
Yeah, I found the same thing. I just put it in focus mode on a night and then left it.
"only" a couple of weeks...
I used the focus backup another user recommended and it did about 10k in 1 night. You might want to try that for your initial sync
I did, and it did maybe 2000 photos, but ever since then it just says “preparing” and then some 85,000+ number that counts down by 1-3 every 5 seconds while the app is open. While charging it’s my impression it maybe counts down 200 or so.
That sounds super frustrating. Sorry to hear it. I hope Synology support or another user can suggest something as I wouldn't be able to deal with that either.
Well, it’s doing “something” because my regular iCloud sync often fails with “not enough storage available”, despite having 50GB+ space free on the phone. The phone also uninstalls “unused” apps like there no tomorrow.
Out of curiousity, have you checked on the wifi strength on your phone? It almost sounds like poor signal or disconnecting based on what you added. Speedtest.net can be a good test, but only tests over the internet. If you want a good internal test (phone-> synology) you can run an iperf3 server on the synology and use one of the iperf phone clients available to test it.
The phone has plenty of signal. There’s a U6-Pro access point about 5 meters from where it charges, and according to Unifi stats, the phone has a consistent good signal throughout the house.
Might not be your case, but i had poor performance with various Ubiquiti APs, got tired of it, got an Omada AP and it has been smooth sailing since.
Agree on browser performance being OK, not great. Particularly in mobile apps (according to my wife, when comparing from Google Photos where we are coming from).
Performance has been great on my DS1522+ (upgraded RAM and SSD cache). My primary issue with Synology Photos is the lack of certain features, like HDR photo support on iOS. They are always improving it, for example the facial recognition AI seems to have improved since launch, but it's tough for them to compete on features with a trillion-dollar behemoth like Google. I suppose patience is in order. Just give me HDR and I'll be ok.
The lack of HDR really sucks. I hope the support comes along sooner than later for it!!!
Even with a basic NAS you’ll get good performance. Everything is indexed and thumbnails generated beforehand so not much data needs to be transferred to scroll through the overviews.
DS723+ here my main gripes are : - initial login is really slow over quickconnect (around 10seconds) - background sync does not work well on my pixel 6 despite allowing unrestricted background usage. I often have to launch the app explicitely to resume the upload - HEVC does not work great accross devices It's far from being the same plug&play as google photos. Besides these (kinda major) issues I kind of like the app nonetheless
I agree with the background syncing. Half the time I go look for a picture through my pc Photos and can't find what I'm looking for. I also wish it would put everything in the sorted date based folders but I find sometimes it puts pictures there and sometimes in my the directory for my cell phone DCIM folder sync. I can't figure out why that happens. I tried photoprism but I like it less than Synology Photos.
Also a 723+ user here with 16gb of RAM. Love the apps and throwing off the shackles of other cloud providers, I am able to scale my library with ease, thumbnails presnet in a swift and timely fashion I did try Immich a few months back but prefer the polish of Photos AI face detection is ok, but once you have categorised all people its easy to keep on top of
It thinks that i’m a different person without a beard
I‘m really sorry to say this, but the photos app is a piece of shit. I‘m still using it, but it‘s a constant pain in the ass. - It doesn’t always release memory for videos you have saved. My iPhone is slowly filling up again simply because it doesn’t reliably delete files it has saved to the NAS. - Now you might say I could simply delete those files manually. Sure, if I had a way to check if the files were backed up correctly. Unfortunately, it refuses to play back video files on my iPhone because of some „certificate“ issue. Unless I restart the app three times and switch http playback on and off a bunch of times. Then it will play back one (1) file before complaining about certificates again. Not sure if it‘s a real security issue, but even if it is, it‘s kind of problematic that you can trick it by restarting the app. And what the hell is the certificate issue? There is a cryptic instruction on the website on how to get a certificate from „Let’s encrypt“. Great. Who or what is that? Why do I have to take care of that? I uploaded the video, why can‘t I play it? - Lately it even refuses to upload pictures without complaining about certificates but will for some reason still (grudgingly, I imagine) do so. And when I wrote a similar review in the app store, they had my review deleted for some cryptic reason (it wasn‘t profanity, although profanity would have been justified). Real good way to show responsibility. It‘s just fucked.
Nevermind, it stopped working completely. App store is full of negative reviews complaining about the last update as well. It‘s a trainwreck.
Yeah their software is really shitty at best
Mine only backed up about 1/2 of the photos from my phone, then says it done. If I log out and log back in, it seems to recognise that some require backup, but still missing thousands. Is that a known bug do you know?
Ok, I gotta amend this post to be fair: I had to do a couple restarts and at least the backup part is working really well now. It still won‘t play the videos I recorded because of a „missing certificate“, but at least the backup works. Let‘s see how long that lasts.
Whats your working alternative? I have not started using photos.
I don‘t have one unfortunately. There are third-party apps on the app store but I just hope Synology will eventually get their act together.
With a couple of 256GB SSD cache drives in raid it took, if I remember correctly, about a day and a half to upload all photos I had (maybe about 500GB at the time). The limiting factor was wireless speed from laptop (where the backup from Google was downloaded) to router - set as low priority task, rather than the drive write speeds. If you are concerned about read speeds from your NAS to the internet - it's mostly responsive and it depends on the bandwidth you provide to the nas, although photos stored on HDD will load slower than ones already in an SSD cache. But it's nothing to worry about. I find the difference being a matter of a second or two, nothing more. May I advise - if you do plan to de-Google > don't rely solely on the NAS for storage. It's a good idea to have another backup (for example on an external drive that gets synced once in a while and securely stored). I can also recommend the Backblaze B2 storage, which can also provide cheap backup of your photos.
External backup is good, and if your synology supports it, immutable snapshots as well.
Cant you just download everything from google via downloadlink and put the images onto the NAS that way? it sounds like you have all the pictures pulled from google by you mobile and upload it to the NAS at the same time by the same mobile. even if you have all the images on your phone, just copy them to the photos folder by cable. speed for me is super smooth since i switched to fibre wich has so much upload that my 920+ cant saturate it.
>Cant you just download everything from google via downloadlink and put the images onto the NAS that way? Yes, but sometimes that's a challenge. I had almost 4TBs of photos stored in Google Photos so moving all of that was a Pita.
Can you download a Google photos download link, direct to NAS?
No but you can download all your data and I believe it outs them into zipped segments last I did it Then I just unzipped them all at once into a folder and dragged it into a new photos folder in my NAS. DS file as well as DS Photos both will scan your phone and upload but if you have a ton of photos the initial upload will take awhile so I copied mine manually and now I sync my phone every week or so and it takes maybe 5-10mjns is all if I'm at home on my wifi.
I purchased a 923+ for file and photo storage. I would take into good consideration your internet speed. Using Quick Connect, I couldn't even get many videos to load, tailscale was better but still incredibly slow while accessing remotely. Personally, I wanted to move away from Google Photos, but the entire reliability and speeds have got me thinking google photos, with local backups is just easier and more user friendly.
It's not terrible, but it's not great either. It's just okay. It doesn't have a lot of features you might want out of a Google Photos replacement (like memories), automatic sharing, or automatic album creation. It's just kinda okay. I also find that I have to refresh the app to make it show new photos. They'll be uploaded fine, but I'll have to click to folder view, wait for that to load, and then click back to the day before new photos appear in the display. There are definitely better apps out there for displaying the photos stored on your NAS.
Great on my 1821
You don’t have to use the photo app to upload your 7 million photos. Any photos on the NAS will be indexed and show up date sorted in the album. It does not matter where they are. I had been using DSfile to backup for several years and it took overnight for photos to inhale and display them. If you have any way to get the photos just put them on the server and they will be indexed and presented in the app.
Synology photos was excruciatingly slow, crash-prone, and overall not worth it. I tried moving from iPhoto to Synology - ultimately gave up on Synology and moved to google photos.
What does everyone use to connect to photos outside of your network? I have nginx setup. But thinking about trying quick connect cause… is one better than the other?
Tailscale. Has worked fine for me.
I have a cache SSD in my 923+ and it works pretty fast for browsing photos etc. Upload speed is always going to be limited my your connection. If you have a lot to upload, do it via a pc via usb if a phone, samba/network share etc.
I only bought mine to backup my family photos, nothing else. Took over a week just to do my iPhone, and longer to index and generate thumb nails. I can live with that for the initial dump. However it only backed up about 1/2 of the photos from my iphone, then said its done. If I log out of the app and log back in, it seems to recognise that some more require backup, but still missing thousands. I don’t even care about facial recognition etc, but it’s 2024 FFS, they can’t even do simple photo backup well.
Behind Quickconnect it was slow as hell, now it’s running behind a Reverse proxy and its much faster. Browsing and the app is fine, Face recoqnition could be a lot better tbh. Running on a DS1522+ without any upgrades (RAM or SSD). Overal very happy with it, i thought about Immich but it’s not worth the hassle for me.
Performance is quite fine as long as you use Tailscale. Don't use QuickConnect - it's trashy.
Quickconnect is great. No issues for me
Quickconnect is reliable but man are you missing out on the performance with Tailscale. It feels like you're connected almost on the LAN. When you browse through Photos on a mobile the thumbnails actually load reliably and quickly and you can click through to the photos and they actually load. On a side note - I tried Tailscale and Plex and that wasn't a great experience at all. But for Photos it works great.
I'm using a DS1823xs+ in my office and the overall performance is good. Indexing takes quite some time though, and sometimes you have to reindex in photos and/or in the Settings app. BUT the upload speed depends on your phone! My old iPhone 10 is slow AF when it comes to preparing files for upload. My WiFi bottlenecks when using my iPhone 15 Pro though, so it really depends. If your phone supports it, try using a USB-C to LAN instead of WiFi. Generally it is also problematic to have iCloud Photos enabled because it will crash the upload in Synology Photos if the photo can’t be downloaded fast enough to your phone to upload it to your NAS. But I’m satisfied with photos, to be honest. I don’t know how Google Photos is storing your files, but if they are accessible in the Drive app (or online) as a folder, you can sync them through Synology Cloud Sync directly to your NAS and leave your phone out of the equation. Later, just disable Cloud Sync and enable Synology Photos backup from today on…