Synology Photos Hack 1.5.0 + Redeem Codes

I understand that nobody can beat Google’s AI but the UX of the app is not that great either.
As a backup service it’s plenty, but no dark mode, no backup only while charging, adding tags and manually tagging faces is cumbersome within the app. I would also like an option to delete the photo from local storage if deleted within the synology app! Very cumbersome to remember delete a photo in two places… make it work like Google photos!
I bought a NAS for photo and video backup! I would love to recommend more folks to get a synology, but it’s difficult when even a tech savvy person like me finds it hard to use.

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.

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.

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 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.

The “Enable Sleep time Back up” doesn’t really work. Put it on for 45 min & it only uploaded 2 pix. I like one stop shop apps, so I hope Synology fixes/upgrades all this sooner than later…
..Google Photos I admit loads way faster, but you catch more faces (which I prefer) but both still makes you try to figure out (like more than half results) who the faces are/belong too& names. The Synology People facial recognition album takes longer than I expected.. just takes ages. But once it works I can see it’s freakin awesome. I’ve tried multiple apps & I still want to use this synology app. It’s just the things I mentioned just keep me waiting for them day they fix & upgrade these things.

The existing functionality of the application well thought out and implemented.

One complaint I have is the free space option removes all photos. It would be nice if there was an option to keep a range on the device like 1, 3, 6, or 12, months for example. That way we have access to them something like iOS memories or an ongoing project.

I agree with other reviews there is room for improvement. Since my photos would no longer be on my iPad I would miss the memories. I would also like album suggestions if I upload all the photos from a trip or party to auto suggestion creating an album for the event.

I’m on DSM 7.1 and have to say that Photos is pretty bare bones.

Object Recognition:
One critical feature that was ominously removed was on-device Object Recognition. On my iphone using Apple’s photos app, I can search for almost any subject and it finds it in a photo. It’s almost magical and I’m not lying when I say I use it every day. The lack of this feature when trying to sort through decades of photos on my Synology is extremely painful. Please consider re-implementing this, or there’s not much point to the Photos app especially compared to Synology’s own “Moments” app that did this, which they discontinued!

Exif Data, filters and search:
I also can’t see or search for any exif data beyond a few basic “friendly” metadata fields, and I can’t create automatic albums from exif data either. Can you imagine sorting through a camera roll filled with years of photos mixed with years of iOS screenshots or saved graphics and images, vs legit iPhone camera shots? Apple’s photos app categorizes by type and application. Why can’t Synology Photos?

It’s 2023 and Photos feels like a novelty until Synology plays catch up.

Honestly this is a very solid app. I’ve had no trouble with it that didn’t have a simple fix (ie closing the app, reopening app or signing back in after NAS restart.) one thing that is a bit cumbersome is not being able to see local photos, the ones which have not been backed up, as a viewing option. I have to go back to the iPhone photos app to see them. Maybe with an icon one which ones need to sync still. Other than that, it’s a great app and alternative to G-Photos. I, at least, know where my photos are going, instead of an anonymous “cloud” server. Thanks, Synology!

On my phone this is a great way to backup photos even if I use iCloud and one of the truly useful tools if you want to migrate you library off of iCloud.

On the TV the app needs work. Generally speaking TVs are multi user devices, this is why streaming apps have profiles. I don’t want anyone with access to the remote to have all my photos, screenshots, etc. This is why I never use the iCloud Photos app on TV either. You need some privacy controls. An option to only allow Shared Space and/or a PIN (or better yet, phone auth) to access the Personal Space would be a great starting point.

Synology Photos is a good alternative to Google Photos, even though the search capabilities aren’t nearly as robust. For example, you can’t search “camping” and expect to get results with pictures of camping. I can live with that though since the reason Google Photos can do that is because they constantly scan your and everyone else’s photos with their machine learning, and I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with giving them that much data into my personal life.