I'm trying to find a photos manager app that would allow my wife and I to see all our photos on separate computers. To do this, I feel like I have to put the photos on a NAS or something similar. From what I have read, it's a bad idea to put the photos library on a network drive. Is there a photos manager that supports network drive use?
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Photo manager suggestions besides Photos app
- Thread starter nottooshabby
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What hardware will be used to access the photos on the NAS? Where are the photos coming from? You want to access and maybe organize, or do you want to edit photos too? And before I forget: a NAS is a valid option to provide access to photos within a network. 🤓
If it's a photos library for a program that's supposed to run locally, yeah that won't be a good experience, but just about every major NAS product has their own photos cataloging program that allows multiple users to be able to access shared photos.
I've tried one on my Synology NAS that appears to be pretty interesting. It even allows you to tunnel into your NAS remotely so you can access the photos from anywhere. It's not right for my workflow so I don't use it. It has some photo editing capabilities, but it's primarily for storing photos.
I just bought a synology NAS. I am going to try the photo manager it comes with and also try immich and see if I can get what I need.
Let us know how you find it and what you do or don't like! I briefly considered using it, but it's just doing too much for my shared photo needs. I actually opted to setup a shared iCloud folder for shared photos. I mostly needed an easy to access file drop, not so much a photo management app.
I really don't see why this is so hard an experience to create.
Apple, here is what I want.
Take the existing Photos App management.
Give me real star ratings, not just favorites and not favorites.
Keep the keywords.
Add a 'community album.' I can share photos in this album with whoever I select for that specific album. So 'Family vacation' album has family vacation photos and 'Work photos' is shared with co workers.
My family can add photos to the 'Family Vacation album' just like I can, we each keep our originals and only we can edit those (so revert works okay). I can duplicate my wife's photo and edit that, and she can do the same for me.
The work directory is the same, but different members can see and contribute.
Smart albums from shared photos would also be nice.
Apple, here is what I want.
Take the existing Photos App management.
Give me real star ratings, not just favorites and not favorites.
Keep the keywords.
Add a 'community album.' I can share photos in this album with whoever I select for that specific album. So 'Family vacation' album has family vacation photos and 'Work photos' is shared with co workers.
My family can add photos to the 'Family Vacation album' just like I can, we each keep our originals and only we can edit those (so revert works okay). I can duplicate my wife's photo and edit that, and she can do the same for me.
The work directory is the same, but different members can see and contribute.
Smart albums from shared photos would also be nice.
Update: I bought a Synology NAS and have been using the "Photos" app for a couple weeks. I am pretty happy with it and it seems to do what I wanted.
First I exported all the unmodified original photos from Apple Photos to the Synology Photos directory of the NAS. When you setup Photos, you can have a shared folder and then users can have individual photos folders. I decided to export all our existing photos to the shared folder.
Once that finished I then setup my phone and my wife's phone to sync our iPhone camera photos to our own personal photos folder. Synology has an iPhone app to make this simple. Once you sync up your pictures, you also have the option to "free up space", where you can selectively remove from your phone photos using certain criteria such as older than a certain date, but don't delete favorite photos(for example).
Once our phones copied all our pictures to our personal folders, I then moved the good pictures to the shared folder.
The synology photos app scan through the pictures and then categorizes them by location, people, topic, etc. Once that is complete you can search for pictures in a similar way as the Photos app. There is also an Apple TV app that you can use to view your photos on your TV.
Overall, I'm happy with synology photos. It's not quite as polished as an apple product, but does what I want. We would have to do the $10 a month plan w/ apple icloud to store all our photos. The NAS was $600, although that is for 6TB of storage in a RAID 1 configuration. I could have purchased less disk space and probably have spent $400. The break even is a few years, maybe never once if I pay for cloud backup for the NAS. If I find some other application for the NAS, then it will be worth it. Regardless it was a fun project.
I may also try immich once it becomes more mature. It's not in a stable release yet, so I'll probably wait a few months to try it out.
First I exported all the unmodified original photos from Apple Photos to the Synology Photos directory of the NAS. When you setup Photos, you can have a shared folder and then users can have individual photos folders. I decided to export all our existing photos to the shared folder.
Once that finished I then setup my phone and my wife's phone to sync our iPhone camera photos to our own personal photos folder. Synology has an iPhone app to make this simple. Once you sync up your pictures, you also have the option to "free up space", where you can selectively remove from your phone photos using certain criteria such as older than a certain date, but don't delete favorite photos(for example).
Once our phones copied all our pictures to our personal folders, I then moved the good pictures to the shared folder.
The synology photos app scan through the pictures and then categorizes them by location, people, topic, etc. Once that is complete you can search for pictures in a similar way as the Photos app. There is also an Apple TV app that you can use to view your photos on your TV.
Overall, I'm happy with synology photos. It's not quite as polished as an apple product, but does what I want. We would have to do the $10 a month plan w/ apple icloud to store all our photos. The NAS was $600, although that is for 6TB of storage in a RAID 1 configuration. I could have purchased less disk space and probably have spent $400. The break even is a few years, maybe never once if I pay for cloud backup for the NAS. If I find some other application for the NAS, then it will be worth it. Regardless it was a fun project.
I may also try immich once it becomes more mature. It's not in a stable release yet, so I'll probably wait a few months to try it out.
Interesting. So, if I understand correctly, your iPhones now upload your photos to the Synology Photos app. rather than Apple Photos on your Mac? Does this happen automatically and wirelessly via Internet? Or do you have to connect a cable to your phone, and if so, do you connect to your Mac or the NAS?
The photos upload wirelessly to the NAS whenever our phones are on WIFI. I opened up a port on our home router so even if we are away from home(on wifi), they will still upload.