A Guide to NAS for Photos - Before You Buy

[Music] hello and welcome back to another before you buy and today i want to talk about buying a nas for photography it's probably one of the most popular reasons that a number of people move away from cloud services given that more modern recent mobile phones are taking some bloody big photos these days and it's only getting bigger so the amount of space being used up for online cloud storage and the amount of security and people's worries about their data being somewhere a little bit more public can be disconcerting a number of you will make the switch onto a network storage device from any one of a million brands behind me and today i want to talk about five of the main concerns i think people should have and things they should bear in mind before buying a nas for photography now by photography it's a pretty broad term there let's be honest photography goes into many forms maybe you're someone working in post working tirelessly to get one photo not tree bar perfect or you're someone that's just got decades of photos knocking around or different usb sticks on different phones and you just want them all in one centralized location we're going to bundle all of that into the word photography today although some of this is going to be more appealing to one or the other it's worth bearing that in mind the first thing that you need to bear in mind when it comes to having a nas of any kind for storing lots of photos long term is indexing this is a word that's been well that used to be thrown around all the time and now it's because it's done semi-autonomously a lot of the time by nazis no one really talks about it but it's still a huge huge huge factor in a nas that's going to be primarily used for photography indexing is when you chuck a load of files a lot of photo files in album form and more onto the nas and then with indexing it has to go through them all now the extent to which it indexes the files that indexes and what it does with that information will become clear throughout the video and the extent to which different brands do it also does differ but the importance of indexing is so that your system knows where all the photos are and they therefore using different photo apps they'll be displayed correctly also if you're searching for photos in a number of ways the system needs to know that these directories exist and what's in them and finally something called thumbnail generation now thumbnails when you do have your system you're looking at it there you're looking at all your photos on your pc you're looking at little mini images there and then when you double click it boom you get the big old image the little one is called the thumbnail and i know how condescending that sounds and i know 95 you heard that when we know that rob move on i get it but thumbnail generation on announce is slightly different because remember when you are accessing the photos on a nas chances are you are accessing them remotely maybe on the local area network which is fine but you might be accessing them by the internet that thumbnail that's generated by the nas also has to be visible on your phone you've got to be able to browse the photos on your nas and not just see a lot of pictures of a big white box that says photo on it the thumbnail generation of an ad is a big part of that indexing it has to create that and keep a record of all the thumbnails and when you browse them on client devices all too often that thumbnail there is a lesser temp file living on your phone that will be flushed out over time as they're recycled and got rid of but thumbnail generation is a big big part of photos on the nas and without it browsing photos on the nas is clunky as hell so bear in mind if you are uploading first to a nas the bigger your collection the more time is going to be spent indexing the more time is going to be spent with thumbnail generation and linking all the information of all the files in the background but this can be negated in a number of ways so for example you can set it up that the indexing is done at a certain time of day you can have it so the system checks and re-indexes in the background maybe at 2am when everyone's asleep maybe it's being done you know intermittently every hour if you're uploading them regularly or it can only be done when you choose to do it you can even pause indexing as well because it will eat away at your system resources and again the bigger the collection the more resources will be consumed during the indexing of your photo so do provision that into it different brands do it a different way when you upload photos onto a synology nas for example and you don't have to even tell them as that they are photos you just have to upload them and then you'll see at the top right of the corner it will know it's uploading the files and then a new pop-up will appear to say that it's indexing these files and therefore it knows about photos video file types pdf et cetera et cetera qnap on the other hand the way they handle is when you upload the files it's quite similar to that of synology but they have a whole dedicated tool called multimedia console and with that one it's far more task specialized app specialized and ultimately does handle um thumbnail generation and indexing um intelligently a great deal better but again it does require a little bit more work on day one which is always the case whenever we compare synology and kuna now the second thing that's a big big big part of more modern network attached storage over the last couple of years is ai recognition it's something that google kind of really introduced into their devices and again if you don't already know about this if you do have a collection of photos on your phone and you're using the latest iphone or you're using the latest google phone or something go into the photo app and there's a search bar at the top and just type in the word cat or dog or hot dog or something chuck in those words and what you'll notice is it will generate results for you without you even naming the files you might have a photo of a cat on your album that you didn't call cats.png but it found it and that is thanks to ai recognition it is that your photos along in line with the index that we just talked about goes through and identifies the context using an a i algorithm it will identify people it'll identify things it will identify animals it'll identify food but different kinds of food different cuisine also some of that recognition goes into geolocation all day that we'll talk about later on but ultimately ai recognition is something that used to be a long time i'll say a long time a few years ago only available on cloud platforms because it needed such powerful computers to do it so you can only get it with third-party cloud and now it's something that's available on synology thanks to synology moments and soon synology photos and at the same time it's something that's available with qnap with q maggie it goes through your photos and then gives you intelligent albums where you can name people okay this person appears in 4 000 photos what's their name you give them a name bertie i don't know who's bernie you give that person a name and then that person then is all of their photos in one place and you can search for bertie and it will find photos of bertie the more people you add you can go i want photos of bertie johnny and sarah and any photo that has those three people boom it will give you those photos ai recognition allows you to for example upload decades of photos onto a nas and then after it's indexed it after it's analyzed it with ai it then allows you to search them in an intelligent way you can look for different kinds of drink different kinds of food different kinds of locations different kinds of animal it is a hugely extensive range supported by the i there on them and you don't need to be connected to the internet to use it which is a big big big big part of this lots of people want to move away from the cloud and when they use a nas with its inbuilt ai recognition software without it being connected to the internet the result is they can have all the benefits of ai recognition in photo collections but at the same time not have to worry that anyone can access their data why am i telling you this because a lot of the time ai recognition and this goes for cloud as well it's not perfect and if you do upload decades of photos and you are buying a nas specifically to take advantage of this um apparent offline ai recognition bear in mind that if you upload a decade of photos there's a lot of people in there not just the people you know but people you don't and when you try to upload all of these photos because you can't tell the ai algorithm how aggressive to be if you have for example a photo of when you're at a gig and there's probably 50 100 200 people in shot if it's a high-res photo the system will go ah we found 200 people who are these two and then suddenly you have got thousands of people to sort through luckily it does sort by this by the number of times they appear so you get to the bottom but dismissing people is tougher and ai recognition is by no means perfect yet so if you are going to buy an house for a hour recognition bear in mind this is not a magic wand that will make everything easier and go away we're not there yet next i want to talk about the importance of meta data and again normally when i talk about metadata i'm talking about plex and video stuff but metadata in photos and just generally if you're going to buy nas for photography is actually a greater deal than i have talked about on the channel i don't think i give it anywhere near um the kind of acknowledgement that it deserves because once you have photos on a nas you have to make sure the metadata is attached and i'll get onto the idea of separation later on but the reason for photos and the importance of having the metadata within them is the metadata will tell you lots of things it will tell the nas what was the device that took the photo what was the aperture of the camera the iso what is the quality what was the name of the device where was the photo taken when was a photo taken geolocational data linked to gps tracking on mobile phones allow you to create a map of the world with all of your photos showing where you took them in a period of time it also allows you to filter and search through photos by time create albums based on that information on top of that it allows the system to present the photos to you in the best possible way it helps with searches it helps with uh recognition it helps with the system creating a far more bespoke photo environment and if you're a professional photographer who wants to use the nas not only for their own private shared collections but the ability to distribute and share their collections uh for you know as a career a job party for a wedding photographer or something or you just want to share them with just certain people within a certain frame like only fighters during this period in this period that don't have this person that do have that metadata is where it is at and in the majority of cases the photos you upload to the nas will have the metadata attached but not always sometimes the metadata is removed or stripped or you are using a camera where the metadata is separate to the file the camera itself will be able to see the photo and it will be able to show you the metadata but once you break it down into the folder structure of the sd card you're using or something all you have is a photo and then another metadata file that's the same name but it's got all of the metadata so if you upload these files to the nas the navs will see the photo it has no understanding of this metadata file so before you buy a nas for your photos if you are going to be using and browsing through them and referencing them in these intelligent ways and searching them in these very specific ways make sure you've merged all that metadata together we'll talk about that a little bit more in a sec but also double check how your photos are distributed see if they contain the metadata if the metadata is somewhere else make sure you locate it before you upload to the nas otherwise it's going to be 10 times harder to put them all together later now the reason metadata is important in this merging is it brings us into our fourth point which is those of you that have moved away from google photos that have moved away from apple and icloud and stuff like that that moved your photo collections away from these cloud services either because it's becoming very expensive and they're removing free uh areas of space something google we talked about earlier in the year or you're slightly worried about how your photos are being used and you're slightly worried about any tnc that's basically saying we use it so we can improve our ai engines and you're not comfortable with that or you're thinking about hacks and stuff like that a lot of people move away from these cloud services and buy a nas for a one-off payment and then they feel like the photos are in one place and it's theirs and it's controllable well the majority of these online platforms if you try to remove the photos they've stripped the metadata and i'm going to focus primarily on google here because it's something we've talked about a few videos at the start of the year but if you try to access your photos and download your photos from google either manually or using a service like google takeout which is this online port which has all of the information you've given to google and you can just go i want that and drag it back and then pull your photos bear in mind that they've stripped the metadata you've uploaded a photo to them from your phone that had the metadata inside and you download it it spits out two files the photo and something called a json file dot json now there are apps out there i'm looking at one there we were talking about before it's called metadata fixer it's the one we used for an article on nas compares a while ago but and that will merge them together quite well or merge them and then you upload them to them don't try to do it afterwards no point get them merged before you upload them it's exhausting it's a bit time consuming but it means the nas can take advantage of all the metadata in the background and present them into the best possible way another thing to bear in mind and an error that has to be said that was in my previous videos about moving your photos away from google photos to a nas um about a year and a half ago it was possible to move photos from google photos via google drive because you could actually get into your photo collection via google drive and automatically sync them onto the nas it's not possible to do that anymore it's not been possible for a while and the result is that the only way to get the photos from google photos which is now parallel to google drive not together or at least one accessing the other you have to go to google take out and strip those files manually which again means you pull them from google photos via google takeout and then you have to use one of these merging tools like metadata fixer and reconnect all the metadata it's boring it's annoying but it's the only way to do it the other thing to bear in mind if you are looking at your collection to photos over time if you've bought a google phone in the last couple of years or you've been using an iphone for the last two or three live photos or gif transitions this idea that you take a photo and it saves like a second two three seconds of recorded video footage that's located in the photo file and you can extract it into a gif or just have it as live photos synology is the only brand where their ai assisted photo recognition tool synology moments and in turn uh coming soon technology photos actually recognizes those and plays them within the browser window so if you do have a lot of um apple iphotos live photos whatever they're called live view or you're using a lot of the google photos that are converting the gifs synology is the brand that will be able to handle those files in a native visual way by the graphical user interface of dsm qnap only displays them as still photos it can recognize uh the information from the metadata it recognizes it's there but it can't display it which is the real shame there the final point for those of you out there we're going to use announce for photography and this leans a little bit more back to the industry the sort of wedding photographers and people that are buying a nas to create their own streaming and sharing service to run a business from photo editing on a nas unfortunately is still pretty caveman compared to everything else we've discussed if you are for example running a nas with smaller photos maybe you're a home user and again you've uploaded all those photos and you want to edit them you want to change the contrast you'll play with it add a few effects you know kind of you're not we're not going to go as far as photoshop and premiere and stuff like that but certainly there are lots of layers in between sodding microsoft paint and the likes of those high-end softwares none of the nas brands have a particularly sophisticated photo editor there's cropping there's rotation a little bit of brightness a few filters but really nothing to write home about if you are buying a nas bear in mind that although you can connect third-party photo editing software to a nas none of the nas brands have any kind of meaningful even i would argue uh premium or featured photo editing tools available synology has a few more in filters and a few more in handling but nothing really that impressive and qnap has less on that score but they have support of google cardboard they have support of vr3 and 360 and different kind of modes of displaying but nothing really on an editorial stance and editing those photos and if you are someone that wants to actively edit big photos and going back to the top of the video the fact that some of the photos we've taken on all modern phones are like 20 30 meg on their own megabytes for a photo these photos if you're on a one gigabit ethernet connection once you hit 20 30 meg it's not going to be good enough 20 30 megaphones although the connection to the nas is 100 megabytes when you're editing a file the amount of data again back and forth and holding it on your system after 20 30 megabytes inside on a photo editing a photo raw and raw is even bigger over one gigabit ethernet is just not going to cut it so if you are going to edit photos on a nas look at a nas that is at least 2.5 gbe 5 gbe or 10 gbe and of course 10 10gb is a bit overkill photo editing there but nonetheless do make sure it has that because if you try to edit on 1gb or even with link aggregation or load balancing it's not really going to cut it and it's going to make your software lag you're going to get frustrated you won't be able to take advantage of things like non-linear editing which keeps shadow files and ultimately if you are looking to edit the photos on a nas you probably want to stick to using your third-party software sure but also go with the nas with a better bandwidth there if it's upgradable great otherwise get one by default 2.5 5 or 10 g thank you so much for watching those are my big big recommendations for buying an ass for photography i hope you enjoyed this before you buy if you have chuck me a like if you want to learn more about getting the right now solution for yourself right the first time subscribe to the channel i talk about nas every day and i do cover this subject in pretty much every detail you can imagine if you're looking for advice and some help on buying the first nas for your home or business needs or upgrade an existing photo solution go into the description and find the link to nas compares free advice it is genuinely a free advice section it's manned by me another chat eddie the web guy we will help you just the two of us it's not a sales platform we don't sell things it is just to help people choose the right data storage solution first time and if you want to donate to it yum yum but you don't have to use that section it might take an extra day or so to answer your email because it's only the two of us but we will answer your inquiry thank you so much for watching we shall see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 13,364

Keywords: ANDROID PHONE BACKUP, CLOUD VS NAS, GOOGLE PHONE BACKUP, GOOGLE PHOTO NAS, IOS NAS BACKUP, MOVE PHOTOS TO NAS, NAS DRIVE PHOTOS, NAS GOOGLE PHOTOS, NAS PHOTO BACKUP, NAS PHOTO PHONE BACKUP, NAS PHOTOS, PHONE PHOTO BACKUP, QNAP PHOTO BACKUP, synology, NAS for Photos, Photography NAS, Synology Photo nas, qnap photo nas, nas for photography, nas photo indexing, nas ai photo recognition, NAS Photo metadata, synology nas photo backup, nas photo storage, nas photo editing

Id: QVSFVLkAtjo

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021