I am curious about everyone’s sharing, storage and workflow. I think I’m partially influence from the heavy Synology posts and backups, redundancy, etc that I want to make things still easy for family to access.
Historically, everything goes to the Synology as an archive. I copy my photos and my wife’s photos from our iPhones to the Synology regularly. However we still keep the photos on our devices, because it’s easier to pull up a photo on the phone.
Albums are created through Hazel and stored on Synology in this format. YYYY-MM-DD Event Name.
However, we don’t have them in albums on the phone. We also have 2 separate folders, same structure on the Synology, the main parents are SLR and Mobile.
With the synology photos app it will auto upload files to whatever format you want. We use year/month and it can rename if you want. This goes to your personal space, and then we go through what we want to keep and move it to “shared space” where we just add a folder of the event…aka 2023/12/christmas.
The nice thing about this is it’s visible on synology photos or any other app that can browse smb/nfs/webdav etc including Apple TV.
You could probably cut out hazel and jus have this all done for you via synology app.
Have you tried the synology photos sharing features? You can share an album and it shows up as just a webpage viewer (with easy permissions to download or just view).
You also can send links to family to upload and specify which folder will go to. For example after a family event send link to everyone and everyone’s phone pictures can be merged to one big event on your NAS. Easy enough with quick connect, or you can do your own domain etc if you want to go that route.
It may not be for you, but if you already have it it’s easy and available and runs well.
I haven’t tried photoprism but immich for me is slow (wouldn’t even consider running on synology, it’s slow on my server which is just faster), seems to have breaking changes every few months, and no Apple TV app. Doesn’t yet meat the wife acceptance level for me.
I am fairly sure you’ll not find two people with the same processes on this topic! Excepting, of course, those who only use their phone and do nothing special with the photos once taken.
I’m also a two system person. Photos taken on the phone… I do nothing special with!
Photos taken with my DSLR:
Import to Lightroom for management — a YYYY/MM folder structure only so I don’t end up with too many in one folder, plus keywords (which I am very particular about!)
Backed up automatically by Time Machine.
Backed up automatically by Backblaze.
Archived to Backblaze B2. Nothing is ever deleted from here.
Select photos are processed (with a variety of tools) and finished versions of those end up on Flickr and in Apple Photos. Any active sharing to other family members (rare, because they’re not “family” photos in general) is done from the latter. Everyone knows where my Flickr page is.
Of course not, but I think sharing makes a spark of ideas. For example, the last few years, my photo setup on my NAS is the following
/photos
/photos/YYYY
/photos/YYYY-MM-DD Event Name
In this approach, each year contains a good 40-50 albums (although oddly after having children, I noticed that my SLR albums are decreasing, but my phone albums are increasing)
Easier to hold a kid and phone to take photos. LOL
But wondering would I benefit if I consolidate to a YYYY-MM approach and then folders with YYYY-MM-DD Event Name
My use of YYYY/MM is partly driven by the desire to not have too many photos in one folder. Some software gets a little upset when there are very many images.
Realistically, I don’t really care about the folder structure as I can find dates via EXIF anyway, but they need separating (no hanging around in large groups, please).