I am a pro photographer and also takes tons of images for family members.
I have installed Synology Photos on my brandnew DS1821+ running the latest software (I think DSM 7.2) and watched the vids Will posted about Synology Photos. In there, he says that you can’t share folders (which I found to be true as well). At first, I tried manually creating the folders inside Synology Photo’s, which worked, but as I have so many folders and files (I create a folder for each “event” we do, yyyy-mm-dd and what the photos are about), it is very tedious to do…
So I copied over the files via SMB, GREAT, no need to really do anything to make the folders and the “upload” is a lot faster (just a straight copy, in stead of having to upload).
When I want to share the folders with members and groups I have created, I have to go into each folder, select the images (I can’t even do a CTRL+A, which is annoying), and share the images with user A, B, C, which works. However, the view the recipient gets, is a folder with todays’ date, with the images inside it, not the naming of the folders I made. Yes, almost all pictures are also renamed yyyy-mm-dd and what they are about, but it’s not that easy to see and download.
Next to that, I want to share the images with my wifes’ family from events we do together, but not with my family and vice versa (thank you GDPR in Europe that is insane). Seeing all these folders with today’s date (I have multiple ones, for each folderset of images I have shared with them), is not really that helpful. Moreover, they would have to go into each folder separately, to download the images and since the majority of my images to share with family go back to before 2012 and we have quite a few gatherings every year, that is a lot of folders…
I have looked if I can share through Synology Drive, but there I can’t see the users/groups, so I would have to create a shareable link in which I select the folders and share them to the various people through the link. When I then add new images, I’d have to send them a link every time, which doesn’t make sense either, I want to keep everything localised.
What I have been doing before Synology, was my own Unraid server with nextcloud and I had various copies of all my high res images (i.e. one for my family, one for my wifes’ family, one for my best friend, one for hers, one for a nephew etc etc). This means when it was my daughters’ birthday, I will probably end up having 7-12 copies of all the pictures I took, which is quickly eating a lot of HDD space.
Since I couldn’t find the answer on this forum, nor on Youtube, I was wondering if someone has the same “issue” and how did you solve it, if at all possible?
In short, ideally, I would like to have one master copy of all my images (sorted in a folder by year, then a folder for example “vacations” and then the folder “2023-06-08=15 Trip X”), which I can share with different groups of people easily. The people I share it with, should be able to navigate to a page or log in with their username and see folder A, B, C, F, H,… which I shared with them, which auto updates whenever we have done another ‘event’ together in one central location.
Is something like that at all possible? Or do I only have the choice to throw all images and video’s (not so many) in one big folder in Synology Photos and share with them that way, or having multiple versions of the same images, for each usergroup separately? (Or don’t care about person A seeing person B’s images and let them download whatever they want)?
Looking forward to seeing how I can set this up.
Thank you in advance!
Best regards,
DrBobke