Synology Photos Reviews

I LOVE that SynologyPhotos 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 SynologyPhotos because it’s gonna wipe everything off my phone and I’ll no longer get the occasional moments from iOS photos. Or even integrate SynologyPhotos 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.

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.

One annoying thing about Synology Photos is that I have a fairly large photo collection (> 1.2 TB) and when I open SynologyPhotos it says “Loading…” for a good 5 seconds or so even on my home network. I’m guessing it’s getting the data on all the photos I have available on my NAS. But why does it have to do this before displaying any photos in SynologyPhotos ? It should cache the data it previously retrieved so the UI is usable immediately and retrieve any updated data in a background thread and if there’s new content then refresh the view. Having to sit waiting for the “Loading…” to finish when starting SynologyPhotos is a bit annoying.

When I first transitioned from Ds photos, I was very disappointed with all of the missing feature like assigning permissions to albums, not to mention the complete lack of a Apple TV app replacement. Over time i’ve gotten used to and grown to enjoy setting picture conditions for albums.
It’s better than Google Photos by a very small margin and better than most locally hosted album apps.

It still has a long way to go to get up to speed with the rest of Synology branded apps, it almost seems like it doesn’t belong!

I loved the way photos are displayed and classified based on geolocation, dates, etc. It’s almost like native Photos app experience.

One area that can be improved is the backup syncing. I’m not sure if there’s some computation (such as thumbnail generation) going on after each photo upload, but it takes significantly longer to upload a picture compared to other apps. Additionally, the backup upload is not very reliably. It works only when SynologyPhotos is open, when you put it in background, it will pause roughly after 10 photo uploads. I basically had to keep SynologyPhotos running to have my photos backed up.

SynologyPhotos is really useful and has really great potential. Please keep improving it to help the customers. Thank you!

PS I will update the ⭐️once the backup sync issue is fixed! 😉

It seems like others might be having issues with the auto backup, but it has worked fine for me. Takes a while to connect sometimes using the QuickConnect servers, but it eventually works. I don’t take a huge amount of photos regularly on my phone, so I probably wouldn’t notice if the backup worked only intermittently.

From time to time, the connection expires and i have to login again but the problem is the photo backup is not being automatically enabled, so you have to always go and enable it again, please figure out a way for users not to always re-enable the backup everytime the connection expires or we re-login to the photos app.

Looking to dump paying another company for cloud storage space, so I picked up a Synology NAS. SynologyPhotos is perfect for viewing my Nikon RAW files. It’s quick, respects my folder structure, and even groups by face. Very happy with SynologyPhotos and look forward to future enhancements.

I would love to see subject/object Recognition come so that I can search for objects/scenes/etc like on other services.

Please try to use it and understand what does a consume need.

For example - after I upload my media from camera roll to the nas, I wish there was a pop up to ask me if I want to remove those uploaded media from local.

Every time after I finish moving the gaming content media to nas then I have to manually select them again to delete it…

If Synology doesn’t invest more time into the features, I will just move my contents to cloud storage, I will not maintain my NAS, I already have the files sync to an external hard drive.

Same as the DS router, it should’ve full content as the desktop interface… I feel like they are still in 2000 - mobile version has limited content compared with the desktop version…

SynologyPhotos was a okay so far. Good from the point I’m trying to decouple from the cloud. Trying to move away from iCloud and google photos.

One thing I would hope is remediated, especially with iOS, is the ability to attach photos from SynologyPhotos into sms/text messages.

I just want to update my review. I think my issue was my iPhone 6s. I have a 7 now and the errors stopped with adding photos to folders. Also just wanted to applaud the support team for the quick response and detailed explanation of what I could try to resolve the issue.

Thank you for the support.

The main reason I use SynologyPhotos and have a synology device is for backups, and SynologyPhotos fails to back up my photos. It always gets stuck trying to upload a photo or video and just goes through an infinite loop of trying to process it. As of now I have hundreds of photos waiting to upload because it's stuck on a single file. This happened on both mine and my wife's phone.

I have recently moved over to synology. Everything is pretty awesome. I do request and I have sent a feature request to enable us to rotate photos within the mobile app!!

Other then that small issue I love it!

Uploading directly to album DOES NOT WORK. The most reliable solution is to upload, then add to album.

As a result, I would suggest you confirm your images have been loaded PRIOR to deleting the image from the true source.

I am a long time synology user. This is a vast improvement over DS Photo and/or Moments. I like the interface and the viewing options available. The fact that I don’t have to log in every single time I open SynologyPhotos is wonderful!!! However, it is not perfect. There are some needed features which are missing. As a photographer I live in the Folders View, so thank you for keeping that view. However, when looking at the folders view, if the folders are nested the top level folder does not get a thumbnail, it only gets a folder icon, it would be nice to be able to select folder thumbnails, even if there isn’t a photo in the folder. I have used DS Photo for many years to back up photos from my phone. SynologyPhotos is a bit of a step back in terms of backing up from mobile devices. It needs the GeoFence backup option of the DS Photo app. Having to open the and keep SynologyPhotos open to back up photos is not an acceptable solution. GeoFences could be implemented easily by simply asking the user if they would like to back up photos when the are at home and then providing the location (or reading the home location of the phone from contacts or settings). I love that when I am sharing photos on a TV (Apple TV) that it only shows the photo that I have selected, and does not show me moving around in SynologyPhotos , However, when sharing to a TV I am unable to zoom in on the photo, I can zoom in on the phone, but on the TV the zoom does not occur. This would be fantastic feature to add so that when sharing photos with clients we can zoom in to see smaller details of the photos. Also a dedicated Apple TV app would be nice. I will continue to update this review and the rating as features and improvements are made.

I noticed some reviews stating that background photo uploads should work now. Gave it another try and it still doesn’t work.

Set it up and all seems good. No issues or glitches. So far I’m a happy camper.

When I run slideshow in the time-line mode, it shows the slides in the backward order temporally. Who would like to see a slideshow backward in time? There is just no way to run the slideshow in the forward temporary sequence as it should be. This is a fatal error to be corrected!

I wish there was a feature to star or heart photos and have an album that auto populates the images. You can do better Synology !

Self hosting is the way to go

The old DS photo is much better than SynologyPhotos. Backing up photos from a mobile device takes forever now, if it even backs anything up at all.

I downloaded the Synology Photos app and have been loving it. The interface is sleek and the organization is impeccable. However I have one request: Please, please, please add a shuffle feature for handheld users. I so desperately want to use my tablet as a digital photo frame with my photos from the Photos app creating the supply. Adding this one feature would make it a 5 star app.

The updated app for photos is a welcome change, it’s smooth and easy to use, thanks for inclusion of AI to help identify people in photos. However, my pet peeve is the lack of an auto backup feature. It would round out SynologyPhotos pretty nicely if rather than opening SynologyPhotos to back up it would do so on its own when connected to wifi. For me, it would eliminate iCloud, gdrive, OneDrive etc...

Love SynologyPhotos but really needs a dark mode badly. Hopefully it can be added soon

I understand Synology Photos must be installed on my NAS, but that package isn’t available on DSM 6.x. Is DSM 7 (beta) absolutely required for SynologyPhotos to run?