 Tom here from Lauren systems and after five years of offering unlimited high-quality photo storage Google has decided not to do that anymore Apparently they've fallen on hard times and even though you're the product They haven't figured out a way to monetize all your photos being in their service. So starting on June 1st 2021 they start charging for that free high-quality backup service that they've been offering a lot of people thought would be free forever And Google Photos is pretty popular by understanding as they have almost a billion users and Even more of your data now This of course bothers a lot of people and people who have privacy concerns about just uploading all of their photos and putting them into The Google Cloud system while it does offer a lot of storage for a reasonable price and does offer a really cool AI system What about doing it locally? What's an alternative to Google photos net question comes up quite a bit and that's where Synology comes in They've actually done a nice job on their products referred to as photo station and moments We're mostly gonna focus on the moments But the moment software is pretty slick and it's essentially a really easy to use something I have no problem recommending to people who are not tech savvy to use as a photo storage Alternative to Google photos now They have a whole comparison here where they break down and the differences between photo station and moments because I was initially confused going They seem to have two products on here that do very similar things and while they are very similar I would say photo station is going to be more geared towards someone who has a perhaps professional photography business and wants to collaborate with clients to have you know comments and Tagging and rating on a particular photo so you can collaborate with your client to make a determination of what photos they like best They both have apps though. They both allow for easy sharing or Collaboration now one prerequisite that's important for all of this that we're gonna be talking about is that one you have a Synology, of course and two that you set up the Synology quick connect because this is what allows you to share these Applications both with your phone when you're not at home or not wherever you have your Synology and be able to share it with others If that's something you want to do if you don't want to do that Yes, this will work completely locally without ever having to do their Synology quick connect Or you could always map ports through a firewall that goes a little outside of scope of this video first Let's take a look at the photo station app The first standout feature that I want to point out in the photo station app is the fact that it has this map feature The moments app is missing that I thought I'd at least point that out other than that Yeah, they are very similar where we can have the photos here The photo station app works more traditionally where you have albums that you generate and I just said it some test Does the album then we can go in here? We can see all the metadata image information that is Exit information also as well that's all stored within this photo Then we have the ability to give this photo five stars add some tags And of course if you had this set up to Collaborate with a client you would be able to share and put this data and have them edit this data as well Like I said, it's more of a collaborative more business focused type of product But it works and you can have it side-by-side with the moments app on the same system Now let's go over to moments because that's what I really want to talk about because I think this is the easy alternative to Google photos and the first thing you may notice is that little scroll bar on the side That looks familiar and I uploaded some old photos some new photos lots of photos that I put in here to see How well it ingested data and actually it was surprisingly fast it had no problem going through and Building the thumbnails and grouping things together and my daughter looking at a phone while she's at the restaurant and The features that you get with Google like the AI they brought some of that over into the moments system Now it's not as robust as the Google platform with the Google photos But it's gotten better over time. They keep adding more features and it's also completely done locally That's the part I know a lot of people will be concerned with so if we go over here to the albums And we look at the people settings it says who's this? I think this guy looks like me a whole lot like me So what that's a Tom and now when we go back over here to the groupings We know that's a Tom many of you have probably seen my son join a few times on this channel in live streams and wander in so that's a Marcus and It recognized my daughter Anika as well for a few photos I had hers will throw Anika in here She does not join live streams quite as often But nonetheless it recognized right away people in the photo things I noticed it didn't do it didn't grab and recognize Anyone else in the background it only grabbed some of the foreground photos to recognize Anika This is where the AI system is a little fuzzy, but does work It just doesn't work as well where it grabs every face out of every pixel that it can find on there Then we can go over here to subjects and these are just some of the other objects or things It does recognize such as car fruit. That's why through a bunch of food pictures in there So it thinks that's fruit, which it is it is definitely fruit then we have some steak pictures that looks tasty It has no problem recognizing a pretty good number of objects I think it's good for a locally hosted system It's seen some snow actually it mistake this for clouds fair enough. I could make steak that for clouds through the thumbnail drinks salads and Motorcycle pictures so it recognized my motorcycle pictures right away now It does have geolocation information in there as well So it does tell me where these photos were taken This was a Lucas County, Ottawa in Ottawa County in Ohio and the other ones were taken like this one It should tell me if it was in It's down here at the bottom. It says New York New York County Which that's what definitely where that photo was taken is in New York now. Let's go back over here And I want to talk about the For you suggestions that it does because I think this is kind of novel Well, the first thing it does is go Tom you duplicated a bunch of stuff I actually did it on purpose that way I could show you what happens if you upload the same photos twice because well You're playing around and want to demo something or you're Uncertain because you're trying to pile all those collections that you have from all over the place and put them into one Single application so all your photos are in one place and you accidentally upload something twice It can go through and determine That there are duplicates in here that goes that's the same photo. Do you like to delete one of those? I sure would there we go We've only kept one of them and it falls off now the suggestions up here not quite as exciting What it's done here is offer to Enhance the photo and the enhancement is no more than this I don't even know how well that comes through with the YouTube algorithm and the compression even makes a big difference It just basically pops the color a little bit. It doesn't seem to make a huge difference between the way it looks here Actually seemed to warm this photo quite a bit So this photo goes from a little bit flat I took with my phone of my kitchen and brightens it up and kind of gives it a little bit warmer of a tone Now you can do that as well when you're going through the photos So if we pull up any photo like this one here of me and the 45 drive server Let's go to edit and we hit auto color or not auto color. Yeah, definitely brings out my skin tone a lot better the Auto color feature is really all you get though for editing I'm hoping in the future in some future updates that they offer more but for now, that's what you get But good enough. It's not really designed to be a photo editing app It's more about being a photo app in general to organize all of your photos and journal things and Take your vacation photos and put them all in one place. That's not in someone else's cloud How do we get all these photos in here besides being able to just hit the little plus and upload it from the computer Because honestly, let's talk about phones. This is where most of the action is happening here in 2021 We take all the pictures with our phones And this is what made google photos so popular as they built it all into the google android system but it also does work on ios and like that we also have these apps available for ios and android for the Synology moments So here are all the photos in Synology moment and you can see they're the same as they are within The app itself it works much the same now I'm on wi-fi connected to the same network as my Synology. So these photos are going to be able to pull really fast But let's go ahead and switch that All right, we switched it to where i'm off wi-fi and on cellular now the important thing to make this work And you can see it's blurry and then gets clear What it's doing is it has a cache copy from when it was on wi-fi And then it will pull down the other copy to have it back on the phone as needed when you want to view photos And let's scroll down way down here to a photo. I know it's not cached or at least I don't think is And that's this one here that pulled up really fast now As I said in the beginning you do have to have Synology quick connect if you want this to work when you're not In your own network and you're connected over cellular, but it will work that way now Let's go ahead and put it back on wi-fi And go to the settings and we go here you see photo backup complete So the nice thing about the way this works is you can say upload on wi-fi only or Upload even when you're on cellular it does give you that type of permission And I actually prefer it to be on wi-fi because I connect frequently enough to wi-fi That way i'm not burning up all of my data Trying to back up photos because sometimes I take quite a few of them So let's go back over here and go to photos and let's take a picture of my Stream deck that I use for switching so let's grab a photo of it real quick Maybe a photo of the laptop here Then we're going to go back and we're going to open up the moments app It'll take a moment and back up those photos automatically It does this on the fly and when you're done it'll give you the option to get them off of the phone So let's go here one more minute one item remaining And now that that photo is backed up complete we can free up space and we want to Delete three photos. Yes, let's go ahead and clear those photo backup. Yep. I know I got them on a sonology Go here go back over here and there they are on the sonology pretty simple The app works really well. I haven't had any problems with it while the testing I've been doing for a little while uploading photos to this I'm actually really impressed with it and we can go back and reload the page and just refresh it real quick on the app And hey, there's that picture we took of the laptop That's looking at that and then here's the picture of the stream deck full resolution Instantly available right there Making it a really nice backup of all your photos that you get to host locally on your sonology Now I so far haven't had any issues at all. I've shared these photos They've even created grouping shared them with friends. It creates public URLs All that works rather well provided as I said you have the quick connect set up And if you want to know who you shared your data with It does keep a log of all the things and all the shares that you have out there So you can easily go back and delete all those was maybe you didn't want them shared or you only wanted it shared temporarily Overall, I would say this is a really nice replacement It does not have the same robustness you're going to get with google photos But hey, you don't have all the power of google behind you You don't have an entire data center full of engineers programming ai systems But you do have your privacy back with this because you're keeping all the data on your sonology One note to that and I'll leave a link below to a video I did on how to back up your sonology because even though we have several drives in the system raid offers a resilience And we'll protect your data to an extent if the machine has a catastrophic failure itself If the machine in its location becomes destroyed in some way through other Events that may have occurred you probably should back it up to somewhere But don't worry if you use some of the strategy backups There is the complete ability to back it up into their cloud and encrypt it so they only have an encrypted Copy of your data, which is obviously really important for back to the privacy and keeping you in control of everything I'll leave links to my other sonology videos and links to this so you can read a little bit more on the sonology app But if you have a sonology go ahead and check it out doesn't cost anything to load it on your system Thanks And thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content Please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from this channel Hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a sure project head over to laurance systems.com And click on the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways There's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated For deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the descriptions of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly So check back frequently And finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video And other tech topics covered on this channel Thank you again, and we look forward to hearing from you in the meantime check out some of our other videos