Video Station/DS video: cos the family finally use this in preference to iTunes library content (cos I stopped updating that). Moments: I'm lazy and just want something similar to Apple iCloud/Photos. Synology Drive: Works for my needs and is enough original Dropbox-y now that Dropbox is bloated and a client resource hog. I have my library on my MacBook, my Mac Mini, my iPhone, and my iPad. All are completely in sync and all original photos are both in iCloud and on my Mac Mini's external disk. The other devices use storage dynamically so if space starts getting low, photos are removed from local storage but still accessible from iCloud on demand. Open the Control Panel go to the Shared Folder settings and make sure that you have a least one folder share that points to a folder on your Synology NAS where PhotoSync or other apps should be able to store photos or other files. Create a share if necessary.

Mac Photo Library On Synology Nashua
Mac Photo Library On Synology Nascar
Mac Photo Library On Synology Nasal
Mac Photo Library On Synology Nasal Cannula

The past year's turmoil and churn with photo storage services was a major motivation for me to get control of my own photo management. My primary goal was to develop a system that was service-agnostic. I wanted a file structure on a computer that I controlled and could easily be moved to a new sharing service if I needed to find another home.

I found a terrific solution in the most unlikely place: my NAS.

Synology NAS

This article is only useful if you have or would consider buying a Synology NAS. Every aspect of this article requires this brand of hardware. You might buy one by the time you get to the end.

One of the pleasures of owning a Synology NAS is the regular discovery of new ways that I can use my existing hardware.¹ The Synology management software (DSM) comes with many self installed add-ons. I recently hailed the new CloudSync option as an example.² For this tutorial, you'll need to install the Photo Station software available to most Synology owners.

Performance

Photo Station is entirely self-hosted on your own NAS. The performance of the software will be dependent on your home network bandwidth, ISP bandwidth, and the model of Synology drive you use. It's a server running in your closet.

What Is It?

Photo Station is a web service and application served by a Synology NAS. All files exist on the NAS in a folder hierarchy and are indexed by the Synology disk management software automatically. The web app can be made available to the Internet by enabling the Synology QuickConnect service or by using a DNS service to redirect to your NAS. This tutorial will not cover the setup for exposing your NAS to the Internet.

Imagine Aperture as a web app running independently on your NAS. That's close to what Photo Station is.³

The Setup

The Photo Station setup is pretty simple.⁴ You login to the Synology admin web page and configure the media indexing service. Photo Station will automatically use the indexed photo share. I setup a separate volume on my Synology with all of my photos and configure the media service to index them. It's important to note that this will be where new uploaded photos are stored by Photo Station. It all happens on the NAS with no Mac or PC required.

The Synology media indexing service runs periodically (you can adjust the timing) but new photos added through Photo Station are immediately indexed and made available in the web app.

Next, login to the Photo Station web app from the Synology admin page.⁵ If you are using the Synology QuickConnect service, then your Photo Station admin page can be accessed from a URL like this:

The Photo Station admin settings provide several levels of configuration. I first configured the layout and design of the interface.

You can also exclude image formats here, so that RAW and proprietary formats are not visible in Photo Station. By default RAW, tiff and HDR are excluded.

On the 'General' settings page, you configure user authentication and sharing services. There are three ways to grant access to photos on Photo Station:

Restrict access to Synology DSM user accounts
Restrict access to Photo Station accounts
Password protected access

Synology user accounts are configured through the Synology DSM web app and provide detailed control over how and what users can access on the NAS. This is just like setting up file sharing on any reasonably advanced NAS.

Photo Station users can only access Photo Station content. You can choose either Synology user authentication or Photo Station user authentication but not both.

Password protected folders can be shared to anyone that knows the password regardless of the authentication method. It doesn't matter how users are authenticated.

There are also settings to control the way Photo Station looks. There is a light and dark theme and customization options for each.

Overall, I like the way Photo Station looks at launch.

Photo Browsing

Browsing photos is not complicated in Photo Station. It's a bunch of files in directories. But Photo Station provides some easy to navigate options. Browse the folders in a hierarchical pane as albums and view them in the 'Photo Wall' mode as a grid. The photo wall provides drag and drop of images to reorder or to move between albums.

Right click an album to adjust the properties such as the cover photo and privacy level. There's also an option to assign an album name that is different from the folder name.

Or pick a folder and browse the timeline. In timeline mode, a few representative images are use and events are separated by day. I organize my photos by year/month and the timeline view doesn't add a lot for me. I can quickly get to a specific month and then browse using the 'Photo Wall' view.

The map view is a bit slow, but provides on of the features I liked about Flickr. Photo Station generates a Google Map with pins based on photo geo-location meta data. Note that this works with all sub-albums too.

Each pin aggregates the photos for the same approximate location. Clicking on a pin provides a quick image browser. Clicking an image opens the image in detail mode.

Detail View

Photo browsing in Photo Share is up to snuff with most of the photo management services I've used over the years. But the photo detail view is far better than most. The detail view in Photo Share has more in common with Aperture or iPhoto than it does with Loom.

The image EXIF data is available for viewing in Photo Share. Tagging is an integral part of Photo Share and it's as easy as it gets. General tags can be entered with autocompletion and there's manual face tagging.⁶ All of the tagging is worthwhile since it makes search useful.

Geo-location is displayed on the detail view and is adjusted with a nice little map interface that also includes location search.

The familiar album ribbon is also accessible in the detail view, which makes it ideal for manually tweaking entire albums of photos.

Basic image correction controls are available in the detail view. Images can also be deleted or assigned as an album cover directly from the detail view.

But Photo Share really sets itself apart with the integrated image retouching tools. There are three different editor options available at any time, Aviary, Pixlr and Pixlr Express. Pixlr requires Flash so I don't use it.

Aviary is outstanding and integrates seamlessly into Photo Share. The editor is impressively complete with all of the basic requirements for image retouching.⁷

Edits are non-destructive and require you to save a new version. There's no worry about destroying the original.

My only complaint with the detail view is that there is no way to manually edit the EXIF data for a photo. I'd like to correct things like the dates on scanned photos.

Search

Photo Share provides a basic global search and an advanced attribute search. While searching is very fast, there are limited attributes to query against. If you want to use focal length or camera type as a search, you are mostly out of luck. For my needs, this is more than enough.

The general search will return albums and photos that match and any search expression can be saved as a smart album. This works great with the face recognition and tagging.

Sharing

As mentioned earlier, photo access can be restricted in several ways. I generally share photo albums with a password for family and friends. They follow the link and access the

Mac Photo Library On Synology Nas