8 ms·

Thanks for the inspiration. I have similar problems now. Gonna use icloud as buffer and start moving out and sort photos to own NAS (synology in this case).

• jmathai 6y ago
  I moved my photos to Synology 5 years ago and have never looked back. I did some very thorough research into a number of options including iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. and they all had some really odd behavior which kept me from using them (i.e. getting select photos into iCloud Photos was impossible - it was every photo taken or nothing ... and don't get me started on iCloud Drive's incompatibility with iCloud Photos). Right now I'm using DS File from Synology to transfer photos to my NAS and from there there's a script [1] that organizes it into a destination folder which is then synced to Dropbox and Google Photos simultaneously. So I get to use Google Photos as my primary photo viewer but it's just essentially a cached copy of my library (which I could trash and restore at any point). I have a series of blog posts [2] about my setup. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie https://github.com/jmathai/elodie [2] https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-automated-photo-workflow-a2ff95b46f8f https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
  • tchalla 6y ago
    Your Elodie script looks great! I have a question. Is it possible to use your script and bypass Google Photos completely? For example, would it be possible to directly put sync Photos from iPhone to NAS whenever you are within a WiFi network?
    • jmathai 6y ago
      Yes. The default configuration does not include Google Photos at all. The script doesn't make many assumptions so you can get it to do pretty much anything (i.e. I wrote a plugin to have it upload a copy of every photo to Google Photos). Here's an example of how you could get it to do what you asked if you were using Synology. 1. Use DS File's Photo Backup option to automatically sync photos from your phone to your Synology. 2. Have a scheduled task on your Synology to process photos in the synced folder to your destination folder. (I have this run every minute - it's cheap, I'm impatient, it's worked for years) 3. (optional) Configure Cloud Sync to sync the destination folder to Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. (Now you've got 2 geographically distributed copies of your archive and each supports versioning)
• wiredfool 6y ago
  I'm about to upgrade my home NAS from a 10yr old tower + samba/netatalk to something more NAS like, mainly for centralized photo storage and time machine backups. (2+ tb of photos, 1+ tb in backups) I'm on the fence between something diy like freenas, or more packaged like a synology. It's got to work for people on macs with small ssds who aren't interested in command lines, writing apps, or other techie level stuff. They just want to be able to find photos in a 20 year archive. I don't know if photos will work with a library mounted on the remote drive, time machine has always been a bit touchy on the old machine over wifi. On the other hand, I'm not sure I trust the synologys if I can't pull the drives and read them elsewhere when things go wrong.
  • ValentineC 6y ago
    I'm using a DIY Synology fork(?) called Xpenology. There's a small risk things stop booting between minor versions, but otherwise it works as well as a real box. > I'm not sure I trust the synologys if I can't pull the drives and read them elsewhere when things go wrong. Synology drives are easily mountable using mdadm + lvm.
    • wiredfool 6y ago
      Thanks for that. Is there there any sort of wizzy photo management in Xpenology?
      • ValentineC 6y ago
        Some Synology users seem to like their Moments app a lot: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments
      • mceachen 6y ago
        You're welcome to try PhotoStructure! Free during the beta in exchange for your feedback. https://photostructure.com/ https://photostructure.com/