Synology Photos: Your Memories on Your Cloud

Synology Photos is a service within the Synology environment. As its name suggests, it lets users store their photos directly to their home or business network attached storage, allowing them to have their personal cloud for photos.

With smartphones being more and more accessible to almost everybody, and content creation taking its toll on smartphone storage, it is high time for users to get onto a cloud service. And for sure, some of them are already subscribed to one. As this ensures that those ‘once in a lifetime’ moments will be captured without the fear of being unable to do so because of storage limitations. While there are multiple cloud services available, some of them don’t offer the same flexibility and security of an owned cloud storage solution.

While there also might be downsides to owning a personal cloud storage solution, these downsides are easily exceeded by the benefits of owning one. Owning a personal cloud storage means that your data is kept in private, and data ownership belongs to only you, the user. However, deploying your own cloud storage solution will cost a serious amount at first, but compared to the monthly or yearly subscription of a public cloud service, the upfront cost of a personal cloud storage will appear cheaper overtime.

Additionally, file management of personal cloud storage, like Synology Photos, is far more superior than those of the public cloud service. Diverse viewing methods are available to users as they can choose to view chronologically or in file mode. In addition, powerful metadata filters, drill down by camera, lens, location, faces and more, in different usage scenario to accommodate professional needs.

Maintenance, however, will be one of the serious downsides of a personal cloud storage, as the user will be the one to troubleshoot if a problem arises. However, the failure rate of such devices is very low. Even when problem occurs, a 3–5-year warranty is provided based on the model. A thorough online technical support is available on the device’s official website.

In conclusion, public cloud service could be more suitable for users who have less amount of photos to be stored and cost of continuous subscription fee is not much of an issue. On the other hand, if the users commonly find the storage to be insufficient as large number of photos need to be managed; or when the data to be stored is the important and sensitive, which makes privacy a priority for the photo management application, then Synology Photos will be the right choice.

Synology Photos not only allows full data ownership, but the packages also fulfill diverse usage scenario. It can be run on computer web, mobile device, and TV application. Synology Photos will continue focusing on design and features, and bring the best solution for users to store their precious memories