The COMPLETE Synology Photo Guide

all right how's it going y'all so today we are going to be spending this entire video going over one of synology's best features especially for home and even a lot of business users and that is Synology photos this is a great application that it's got a few quirks to it that makes it kind of hard to understand at first but once you get the workflow down it's actually very powerful and it's a great replacement for Apple photos Google photos and just a way to consolidate your entire family's photos all into a single location that's for personal use for business use I set up for a lot of clients by the way if you want to hire me there's a link for that in description I set up for a lot of clients where essentially they've got the ability for all of their photographers to be able to have their own section and be able to pull up photos from any given shoot say hey you're with a client I want to show you this image and just on like an iPad being able to pull that up and see the high resolution image files in just a really easy way of seeing your past work is really nice especially because it supports really really good XF data you can filter by ISO you can filter by camera model everything you can filter by which can be very very very useful for photographers specifically who need to be able to say all right I want to look up this let's just look at things that have been tagged as portrait and filter down like that all right so in this tutorial we're basically going to start from absolutely nothing we're going to install photos itself show how to set up for multiple devices how everybody can see everything and then I'm also going to show some really useful tips and tricks that I do especially when it comes to family things then from there this is going to basically Show Business users hey these are some things I could do I could tweak it this way and have it work for you but it's really mostly going to be focused on a family setup because that's predominantly who this is designed for though it is very adaptable thankfully and so this is going to assume you just have a sonology and ask and you need to be running DSM 7 or later so previously there was photo studio and moments and they merged it together into a Synology photos which is pretty much the best of both worlds for the most part some people who specifically had a very specific workflows with photo station don't love the upgrade though all right so before we get started I'd like to thank Aura for sponsoring this section of the video so what is Aura Aura is an easy to use app that has everything you need to stay safe online or response to the channel a few months ago and since then I've been using the service and there are really two things I found really useful here one the robo-dialing so after adding my cell phone number on the service I don't think I've gotten a single robocall and then the other thing is credit card monitoring and so every single time I open a card or anything within 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already have a app that does one of these things but with aura you don't have to download and pay for 7 in different apps to do this let Aura do the hard work of keeping you safe online if you sign up with my link right now or it will give you a two-week free trial you will be shocked to find out how much of your personal information was exposed just in those two weeks alone go to aura.com space rex or click the link description to sign up for your free trial today all right thanks to Aura for sponsoring this section of the video alright so now let's go straight into it so the first thing you need to go ahead and do is log into your Synology Nas and we need to go in here right with DSM the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go in the package Center and just download and install photos we're going to install it and now while that's working I want to kind of talk through some of the setup here and the first thing we're going to see right here is enable user home services so this is for this section if you want everybody to have their own little section and then ask for their photos called personal space so this is predominantly where hey you can put any photos you want there every single user can put whatever photos they want there and nobody else will see them unless they are shared side note any Linux administrator will be able to see all of them that's just how Linux works but every single one of the users will not be able to see anybody else's photos unless they've been shared with them and that's really how it's set up and this is what's going to be called the personal space so there's two kind of Concepts here there's personal space and shared space the ideal way to set this up after really tweaking it and messing around with it a lot of times is you really basically want to use everybody's personal space as their own scratch area they can do whatever they like there and so you want to put probably the phone backups there any images they don't and everybody default and see on there and then for family photos where every single person should be able to see these you put them in the shared space I'm going to go all over all that here so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to say yes we want to create the home services and so we're going to say yes and run all right so now that that has installed I want to go over a very quick commonly asked question and that's essentially when we go into file station we're now going to see two new folders we're going to see homes and home and this is a Linux concept that is pretty simple once you understand it but really confusing other than that so if you look in this homes folder you are going to see a different folder for every single user on your Nas only if you're signed in with an account that has admin privileges that's where it's part of the administrator group they have admin privileges so since I'm signed in as a account with admin privileges I can see all the users home folder so right now I'm signed in with Will and so I have this home folder right here but I can also see it right here so this is just basically the ability for me as the administrator to be able to see everybody else's home folder regular users will only see a home folder and it's going to be unique for them so right now I'm signing with Will so if I had a new folder in here called demo and I then open up will right here it's right there that's because this will folder is the exact same folder as this home folder they're just renamed and put in different locations and so that way I as the administrator can see everybody else's accounts and so everybody else has their own space that only they can see every single user when they see the home folder will see the home folder of the user they are signed in with and so it's a way for everybody to get their own space but it's a very commonly asked question that I get because it is kind of confusing all right so that's what I want to say and from now on in the video whenever I'm talking about the personal space it will actually be in this home folder right here for each user that's how it works where everybody kind of has access their own space it's the home space where only they have access to with the side note that administrators can still see it all right so now with that out of the way let's go ahead and launch the Synology photos app and we've got some options here so first off it asks do you want to do facial recognition in the personal space so if you have a more powerful Nas you can do this or if it's useful for you note when you import a massive Library it could take a couple days to do facial recognition on every single one of these images the once it's done it only has to do it once but just know that I mean it is local facial recognition it's not sending off to a cloud or anywhere where it's basically taking your data no this all on-prem facial recognition so you do have to have your Synology running that facial recognition so it can take a little while when you're importing hundreds of thousands of photos for the very first time but then after that it's pretty quick and so I'm going to enable that totally up to you I do like that it is on-prem which means you don't have to worry about your AI being used to train anybody else and now we've got the option to download the Synology photos app for either Apple or Android phones up to you these are great apps and I'll show you them here in a bit here too and so now we're just going to say start now the first thing I'm going to want to do is I'm going to want to go in and I'm going to want to set up a shared space so that everybody has access to this group location so to do that as the somebody who has an admin account we're just going to go in here settings and enable the shared space so now when we go over back into DSM we're going to see if I refresh this we are going to see a photo space and we're also going to see in my home folder a photo folder so this right here is where it's really confusing but once you understand it it's pretty simple so this photo folder right here that is at the root level which is a shared folder is what's known as the shared space so pretty much anybody will have access there that's at least the setup I'm going to walk through here and so it is a group place any images that end up there everybody can see in the shared space then if we go into my home folder we'll see photos this is the folder that is my personal space so if you can keep that clear and kind of understand that it's really confusing at first but once you get it it's pretty simple It's just tough to understand the very first time basically every single user's home folder has a photos folder and that is their personal space and then there is a single photo folder at the root level up here called photo that is the shared space so now we want to set up some permissions and we're going to set this up very simply and we're going to go in and we're pretty much just going to say all of our family members have access to this shared space so the way we want to do that is we want to go into control panel and create a new group and we're going to create a new group right here that's called family and we're going to say that has full access so basically a simple group that says hey it's family anybody and family is going to have access to photos and the shared space this is by far the easiest way to set this up you can add any users in here that you would like to I'll go ahead and add myself though I will by default already have these permissions and then you do not have to give them access to this photo folder though you can if you would like to if you only want them interfacing through the photo folder the shared space via the app you can do that or if you want them to be able to dump their own files in there you can give them read write to it where they can access it over SMB that is up to you I'm not going to in this case and then we just need to give permission specifically to the photo application right here Synology by default does not give all users access to Synology photos though I wish they would okay so now that is done the next thing we need to do is Grant permission for everybody in that User Group family to the shared space all you have to do is do this once and then it's done and that's it it's just just follow these steps and it'll make your life easy so we're going to go back into settings back into shared space and we're going to set access permissions and we're going to select the family group that we just created and we're going to give them full access the reason you want to do this is this is how you can give people access to the entire thing and they're actually going to be able to see the very nice timeline view if you limit the permissions at all they can only see folder level which is not great so you really want to set up family and basically have them full access to it here okay it's done the last option you get is right here you can say enable People album in shared space that is that facial recognition not only in their users home folders in their personal space but also in the shared space I'll enable that now okay so now that's all we need to do we're basically going through and setting the basics up here and so that way it's easy to build off of so now we're going to go back in and I'm just going to show you how to create a new user for this and we're going to quickly give them a demonstration of what they're able to do so right now I'm going to go back into control panel and go back into users and create a new user let's say Bob we're going to give Bob a username and password and all we need to do for every single family member you add is Tick this family right here when joining the groups and then they will have access to everything we need them to have access to one click that is all we need to do so now what I want to do is I want to show you how Bob is going to see everything so I'm going to open up a new private browser on the right over here so that way we can sign in as Bob and see everything through Bob's lens all right so now I've opened up Synology photos as the user Bob and this is what they're going to see the very first time and so now we will see that anything I do over here will be through the lens of Bob so I'm going to go ahead and go into Bob's personal space and add some photos these can be uploaded from the phone these can be done however you'd like to but I'm just going to upload some really quick voila basically we've got Bob's personal space so now if I go over I'm going to scroll back over to the left which means I'm signed in as will I'm going to refresh my page you can see I can't see any of those photos my personal space has not been changed so that means that Bob's personal space is all there and just for people who need to kind of see it we're going to go back into file station as well and so we're going to go back in this homes folder and so we can see the Bob user and now if we double click on it we'll see photos Library and then your month date we will see that those are the images so when I dragged and uploaded them into here it automatically created them by year month and upload the images in there so this is Bob's space so that's where the personal space is stored I hope that makes sense it's basically just as an admin you can see it all so now I want to go in and let's add some photos to the shared space so as Bob we're going to do the exact same thing but we're going to switch over to Shared space which she has full access to because he's part of a family user we're going to add another photo here and we'll just upload some of my random wedding photos so these have been uploaded into the shared space so now we added these photos from the Bob user but in the shared space quote unquote I'm going to go back in as the will user I'm going to go into the shared space and we will see that I see all these images because they're part of the shared space everybody in that family group can see all the images there it's by far the easiest way to handle this is everybody gets their own little section of the nas so now that is pretty much the basics of the personal space in a shared space it's something that's pretty easy Once you kind of get the hang of it but at first it's kind of confusing essentially your personal space is your own section of the Nas and your shared space is going to be shared amongst your entire family and just for those who see better with files if we go into the photo folder right here we'll see that boom right here this is the photo library right there those are all the images that were uploaded to the shared space and so if you have a ton of DSLR images of your family throughout the years you'll probably want to just drag and drop them right into this photo folder and that way Synology will automatically find all of them add them in there and show you them in a timeline view by date along with all the XF metadata which is very nice all right so now that's the big leap gone through we now have gone and figured out the difference between shared space and personal space and how you can really utilize those things the next thing we're going to want to do is kind of show some albums and how to share so I'm going to go ahead and just close out of this Bob user now because we really don't need it anymore and I'm going to open up as the will user so say I want to share these five images with the internet say I just want to share them to any people you want to be able to see them you want to create a public link so I'm just going to select them all and I'm going to hit the share button right here so now it's automatically taking my Quick Connect right here and I can create a public link this means anybody with a link can view you can also password to protecting everything like that or you can only share it with specific users but for this case I'm going to share it with everybody so I'm going to copy it hit save and I'm going to open up a new private tab so that way we can see it as if somebody who's outside my network who's not signed in and we can see right there we can see all of the images so that's an easy way to share images and you can do this either in your personal space or your shared space so that's basically how sharing works for public sharing links all right so that was the basics of how to share things publicly with people now I want to go over how to share things with other users because there can be some very useful workflows here for having different things so if we remember the shared space is kind of shared with everybody by default that's how our setup is but instead we may want to be able to share with specific users so say you've got some files that maybe you and just one other person need to see but you don't want everybody to have access to them in your family who knows what they are you can do that here so I'm in our my personal space I'm just going to upload a quick photo here so I'm just going to go in here and copy some photos into my home folder under photos and one other thing to note any files you drop in here it's two ways of looking at it so any files you just drop in here in your home photos folder will just show up in personal space and any files you drop in personal space and photos will show up here really all Synology photos is is a UI for a file structure and so that's one of the really nice Parts about it is it's really just showing you the folder structure underneath in a much cleaner way where you can see all the images in a nice timeline view but they're still stored in the nice photo structure that you've got set up however you want to do that so in my opinion it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds because it also allows you to walk away really easily something that Google photos does not allow you to do as many users will have found so now I just drop those in my home folder so now if I go over to my personal space over here and refresh the page we'll see they've showed up here and we can confirm that by changing the folder view where hey look now it's the same view now say I want Bob to be able to see all the files in this folder this could be anything this could also be your entire mobile backup so say you want to be able to share all of your photos with your spouse every single photo from your phone with your spouse you could share essentially the mobile backup folder with your spouse and now they don't have to bug you to say hey you took that photo at dinner I want it really quick no they can just go on and just grab it straight from your folder without having to like deduplicate between everything essentially they just have a folder where they can see it so essentially say we're going to choose this folder right here we're going to go into albums and create a new smart album that's a new conditional album right here and we're going to say that this is so I'm just going to call this beach horses but what you could also do is the mobile backup so I'm going to now just say any photos in this folder so we're going to select the folder that's B choices here are going to be shared and so if you chose this to be your mobile backup you could share it there and so now we have an album that contains every single file in this folder and so now all you have to do is share it with somebody and we're going to set it to a private link so only people we invite can access it and we're going to fortunately this is up here we're going to add Bob to it and so we're going to set Bob as a downloader so Bob can basically see all the files in here and download them so now we're just going to hit plus and be done so now we can see right here it's shared with Bob and myself if we just go ahead and sign in as Bob again we can see that under the sharing we can see shared with me and so if this was your mobile backup they'd be able to always see any of the files there and so it's a very easy way to see everything and so that's a great section for being able to set up specific albums for hey all these different events and then share them with people without requiring all these complex things and without requiring every single person to have access to them all right and so just like that Bob can see all this and by the way I want everybody to realize like this all is actually operable completely on your phone too using the photos app but it's just a lot easier for me to show right here but for the majority of users 95 time you're probably accessing the photos on a phone or an iPad app okay so that is how sharing with a specific user works and it's very very very powerful so now I want to close out of here and I want to set up a new photo request this is a great thing they've added recently that allows you to say oh hey everybody send me the files from the that party from that event from that hike who knows whatever you can set up a new photo request so we're going to go in and just hit photo request and I'm going to create a new photo request give it a subject and now what it allows you to do is it allows you to choose the destination folder so I'm going to put it in my personal space wherever I want to put it you can also put it in your shared space and so we're going to say all right everybody upload these photos to this folder and you can even add in some constraints here for expiration and very thankfully a maximum size per file so nobody sends you like massive raw files that you then have to keep and you can also add them to an album if you'd like to so now it's going to be create requests and so you'll see it right here so I'm just going to copy that and open in a new tab so we can see it new private tab so that way we're not signed in we can see exactly what other people will see so now they're gonna like hey add these float folders so now I'm just going to select them and we'll just select these guys right here whatever you'll put your name right there and now upload so that is a way that you can get a bunch of people to send you photos so now if we go back in here we can see the photo request we can click on it and see it right here and you'll notice that these files were originally WGY this number but it's added a will underscore to it because the name I put in there was Will and so that's a great way to tell who sent what and so just like that you've got the ability to get people to upload folders to you without even needing a account on the nas it's a really useful for collecting files from events and stuff and it's a great thing they've recently added in there alright so now we've covered the overall sharing information now let's also look at some of the great filtering options they've got here that you can choose to filter by and this is where Synology really shines specifically when it comes to professional photographers who need access to XF data be able to filter by stuff very quickly using this gear icon up here we can set any number of conditions that we'd like to that make it very powerful you can do focal length everything you might need you can start filtering on which is really nice so you can filter by a specific aperture and get all of your images exactly like that as well as Lightroom tags any stuff in the accept data then we we select an image you can also go in info right here and you can hit more and it's got all the XF metadata just dumped right here so you can find exactly what you need anything in there you'll be able to find it'll just show you it which get makes it very useful for professional photographers they've also got some basic descriptions and rating here and tags but that's really it it's really designed to be a read-only application that just shows you your images rather than necessarily an application that lets you edit things you don't want to try to add those features I'm glad they don't some people wish they would but in my opinion it's spinning too many calories on something that you probably can just do on a better app and it's going to give you way better experience anyway so that's all the XF data the other nice thing is these load in Ultra quickly because they are jpeg previews but you can download the full quality ones right here and so it lets you over mobile stream all these ones because it automatically makes previews without having to download all these massive like raw files and so the other thing that is nice it does have support for the vast majority of raw files I found I've not really found any types or raw files that it cannot show you which is great all right so now I want to give a quick overview about mobile backup I'm not going to go into in super depth here because well quite frankly I've already done it in a very good video that's you should probably watch I'll just leave a link to this in the description below but there's two things to know about mobile backup for the best possible experience when setting up mobile backup leave the default photo on because then it's going to store everything as the name of your phone then year then month really clean way of handling everything and otherwise it just kind of dumps all the files to the folder which makes everything slow because you don't want to have a hundred thousand images in a single folder because just loading simple operations ended up taking a very long time when you do that and so keep it in the default folder and the very first time you do it you want to enable the Sleep Time backup that's essentially where your app stays open so one thing that iPhones do which is why they tend to have good battery life and Android does the exact same thing to conserve battery life is if an app is running and the user's not opened it in a little while it's going to force it into a low powered mode and so for a photo app that means it's only going to be able to upload maybe a couple hundred images if you have a hundred and fifty thousand image Library it's going to take very long time using the low power mode to be able to upload all those images and so what you can do is on the photo app if you go into more enable sleep time backup click that what it will do is essentially it will leave the screen off but the app on that way it's like locking your screen but the app stays open and so IOS and Android will not shut down the actual application because the user still has it selected so if you just hit enable sleep time backup in 10 seconds it is going to go where the screen is completely black and so what you can do is without locking your phone if you lock your phone this will not work because well it'll lock you can see it's black but the app is still running so the very first time you do a photo backup just plug your phone in overnight enable that and that way the app stays open and your phone allows the photos to keep being transferred then when you tap the screen it comes back on so that is really useful the other thing to know and I get questions about this all the time is hey I've got smart previews for iCloud where essentially it does not store all the Full Resolution files on the actual mobile device instead it only stores the small previews and then once a user downloads it then it shows the full ones so that still works in this case the way iPhone works is anytime an app requests an image the image is then downloaded from the iCloud servers before being handed to the app so the app will be uploading the full resolution files but if you've got low internet and hundreds of thousands of images every single one of them will have to be downloaded from your iCloud account and then uploaded the Synology so I have found those do take a while but for the vast majority of users leave the sleep on and maybe it takes five nights probably though it'll just do it in one or two for the vast majority of users but it's just one thing to know there's no other way around it just because you want your phone to be in power save mode the other thing that's nice is those low powered modes that it's forced in pretty much gives enough juice to be able to upload all the images I've been doing this for a few years now I guess probably I guess a year and I've never had a case where it was not uploading all the images pretty much every single time I've Ever Needed an image it was already on there and so it definitely has enough power to keep consistent with the number of images but it just can't catch up if you've got like hundreds of thousands of images one final thing I would not recommend enabling is this free up space unless you really are okay that Synology is your only source for these photos don't hit this because this will delete them from your your phone and while I love Synology photos I would not say you should just solely rely on it I like it as a backup not as the primary and so only enable that clear all photos if you won it's like maybe I don't know it's a field phone and it's just taking videos so you know it's just designed to be sent back that I've had some clients use it for but other than that I would probably recommend just keeping it as a backup and a way to share all your photos rather than necessarily completely relate replacing your primary source for photos all right so now last thing we're going to go over is going to be facial recognition so now facial recognition works completely on the nas so as I said earlier it will take a while the very first time you upload a massive image Library especially with a slower CPU but the way you get to it is you click albums and people and you can see you've got it in shared space and personal space so in my personal space you can see that it's found me and it's found my wife so I'm going to say will Yarborough and voila now it's going to do its best anytime I upload images of either one of these people it will try to add them to the groups it's not perfect and so it sometimes will require manual merging where it's like hey it's detected the same face but like five groups of the same person you just add those all under the same name and it merges it all into one big group and that's the way you keep up with it it works pretty well overall especially after a while once it's done many many photos it does a very good job and so it's a useful way to be able to see all of the images of that person and it's really great to be able to go back and just see what you've got I really like having facial recognition and that's pretty much it we've gone over all the Synology photos Parts on the mobile app but I'll just leave a link to that description it's really easy you just sign in with your quick connect username and password and now you see everything on the actual phone rather than just being on the computer if you'd like to hire me there's a link for that in the description below and if you have any other questions for tutorials or anything like that put them in the comments below all right have a good one bye [Music]

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 124,995

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Id: VOL-GLi8Qqw

Length: 33min 40sec (2020 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2023