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Anyone also used Synology Photos and able to compare it's functionality to this? Which is better?

tedtms 3y ago
I used PhotoPrism some time ago when it was slightly less featured, but wasn't satisfied with it. The dealbreaker for me is auto mobile backup. PhotoPrism relies on a third party app to "sync" photos, which isn't the same as backing them up. With that said, PhotoPrism is all the rage in the self-hosting community and I can definitely see why. Conversely, Synology Photos (which I use instead now) has a fantastic mobile app. However, if you really want reliable and granular object/face recognition, the Syno app is a little bare bones. It does some face recog but that's really it. However, its backup feature is reliable and I don't have to worry about if it's working in the background or not. I tried Nextcloud's photo plugin for a while too, but its mobile app had issues and I just couldn't rely on it. Another project I've been keeping my eye on is immich: https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich I'm happy for now with Syno Photos but it would be nice to have my photo app in my container environment with everything else I run and just use the NAS for media storage like I intended to.
- secfirstmd 3y ago
  Thanks for that!
justsomehnguy 3y ago
It's not a proper comparison, because I have ancient ds115, but Syno's app is really barebones. I tried it on Xpenology too, just to be sure, but overall it's... meh. PhotoPrism was way better compared to it.
rce 3y ago
The Synology Photos UI feels much more polished and it includes a mobile app. Synology Photos only has community mobile apps, which weren't well maintained. And last I checked Photoprism did not have multi-user support. Synology Photos feels much more like something I could get my partner and kids to adopt. The downside is that Synology Photo's database schema and API are not officially documented, but you can find people who have documented them and since it's on a machine you own you have unlimited access to them, so it's still a big step up from Google Photos and Apple Photos which are chock full of restrictions - e.g. Apple Photos doesn't even have a web API.

I used PhotoPrism some time ago when it was slightly less featured, but wasn't satisfied with it. The dealbreaker for me is auto mobile backup. PhotoPrism relies on a third party app to "sync" photos, which isn't the same as backing them up. With that said, PhotoPrism is all the rage in the self-hosting community and I can definitely see why. Conversely, Synology Photos (which I use instead now) has a fantastic mobile app. However, if you really want reliable and granular object/face recognition, the Syno app is a little bare bones. It does some face recog but that's really it. However, its backup feature is reliable and I don't have to worry about if it's working in the background or not. I tried Nextcloud's photo plugin for a while too, but its mobile app had issues and I just couldn't rely on it. Another project I've been keeping my eye on is immich: https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich I'm happy for now with Syno Photos but it would be nice to have my photo app in my container environment with everything else I run and just use the NAS for media storage like I intended to.

secfirstmd 3y ago
Thanks for that!

justsomehnguy 3y ago

It's not a proper comparison, because I have ancient ds115, but Syno's app is really barebones. I tried it on Xpenology too, just to be sure, but overall it's... meh. PhotoPrism was way better compared to it.

rce 3y ago

The Synology Photos UI feels much more polished and it includes a mobile app. Synology Photos only has community mobile apps, which weren't well maintained. And last I checked Photoprism did not have multi-user support. Synology Photos feels much more like something I could get my partner and kids to adopt. The downside is that Synology Photo's database schema and API are not officially documented, but you can find people who have documented them and since it's on a machine you own you have unlimited access to them, so it's still a big step up from Google Photos and Apple Photos which are chock full of restrictions - e.g. Apple Photos doesn't even have a web API.