 Tom here from Lauren's Systems and is Synology Photos a replacement for Google Photos? Well in November of 2020 it still kind of depends on you and your use case. If you're just looking for a system to back up all of your photos that you maintain control of and goes on your Synology and automatically works with a really nice slick app from your phone. Yes, Synology Photos is a replacement. If you are looking for some facial recognition, this is where things get a little fuzzy. Google has done an amazing job with Google Photos. Facial and object recognition is pretty much second to none. I haven't seen anything that works quite as well. Synology isn't quite there yet. One of the problems is when you're testing it versus when you're using it, you'll notice some of the shortcomings and what I mean by that. When I say I'm using Synology Photos, I didn't want to just do some basic testing and load a handful of photos and say, all right, this is a good product. I actually like to put products to the test. So I went ahead and followed the guide over at Android Place, made sure I had all of my photo exported from Google and imported in Synology, and that turned out to be over a hundred thousand photos. Then I told Synology to index all the faces and objects and metadata it could find on there. And that's when you'll notice things like, well, it does find faces. But for example, when I search for my wife, it doesn't find nearly all the pictures I have or my kids. It works pretty good, but it seems to not be able to index at the same scale as Google. But that's where they are right now in November of 2021. And overall, my feelings on Synology Photo after testing it for several months now is I really like it. I think the application works well. I think the ability to back up automatically works well, because I'm just going to be honest, if I had to manually take the photos out of here and upload them somewhere, it just wouldn't happen. Now, some of you might be asking, what about some other alternative besides Synology Photos? Because Synology Photos requires a Synology. Well, I know there's a few other open source projects out there. One of the reasons I chose Synology, and well, when we work with them a lot, but I know they're very turnkey and easy for a lot of the home users and consumers who go, I just need a product that just works. I want to be able to share photos between my family, but I don't necessarily think Google should have a copy of all my photos. And this is where Synology really shines. You can set up multiple accounts, you can set up multiple people using at the same time, you can still share with people outside of your Synology users list by creating Quick Connect and doing shared albums. So they have a lot of the basic features people would want, and they still are privacy oriented because even though they have facial recognition and they have some object recognition here, it's not leaving your Synology, it's being done on the Synology. But as I wanted to point out, when you're kind of a power user, I think having over 100,000 photos maybe makes me a power user, but they are collected over quite a number of years. My first digital camera was actually a Sony Mavocable floppy disc. And yes, I still have those photos and they're in that collection of photos. But back to the topic. My overall experience over the last few months of using Synology is I'm going to continue using it. I think it works really well. I really haven't had any problems with it. I would say any of the shortcomings of not being able to find certain objects is something that could be overcome later. Or because I'm in possession of all of my photos is an opportunity where I could either use a Synology app if they make it better or use some other third party app to further analyze them. The first step is of course maintaining and you having control of all of your data. This is where Synology has one other thing that Google doesn't do is go to a job of right now. Google is always trying to figure out how to kill some of the resolution or bring you a lesser file. One thing about the Synology is they're not doing that. It is a full backup of whatever video I took, whatever photo I took. This has been actually really nice. And alternatively with when I've done things like on a vacation and taking my GoPro or my non phone cameras and taking video, uploading those Synology is a nice place to be able to keep and index all of those. Their geolocation information they pull if you have a GPS turned on works really well. Their ability to pull all the metadata and sort it. And if you are not being lazy and take the time to tag groups of photos that you upload, this does allow you to really well stay on top of things and tagging them instead of having just rely on AI. Google's really made me lazy about that because I can just search for something I remember seeing and Google will tell me when I took the photo of it. And it's almost scary that it works that good. But boy, one day we could be there with our own because as computing power gets better. And as these machine learning models that understand object recognition get better, eventually I will be able to re-index this data. Because honestly, when the Sony Mafia came out and uploaded those photos or didn't even upload them, I put them on my computer because there's no Google photos. Then Google's able to index them now today that was not possible when I had that camera originally. So like anything, this is where opportunity comes in to get better. And I just one of the reasons I would recommend, you know, if you are privacy oriented and you're worried about third parties having it, or you just don't want to pay the fees because you want to be in possession of it, then knowledge photos I do would say is a good alternative. One thing of note, the responsibility is on you to pack this system up. So I want you to keep that in mind if you decide to go with something like analogy photos or start storing them on your computer, you do really have to keep it back up. This is where Google photos for the absolutely dead simple, pay a few dollars a month, they'll take care of everything, does make it a compelling offer. But for those of us that are a little more privacy oriented or just don't necessarily want some third party going through and indexing whatever I've decided to put my photos, analogy photos is a good alternative for that. I'll leave links down below to the Android police article and thank you. 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