Google Photos is second to none when it comes to AI capabilities, and information technology certainly spoiled us for skilful with its unlimited high-quality uploads offered until some time ago. But with Google's call to count your media uploads against the Drive storage, many of us with a Synology server turned towards its photos app as a solid self-hosted alternative. The Synology Photos got its biggest upgrade in years recently, making it pretty easy to ready upward an automated backup for the media files that are on your telephone. Just how do yous move your entire drove of photos and videos on Google Photos that you've curated over the years to your Synology NAS?

Moving your media from Google Photos to a Synology DiskStation is a 2-role process. You'll first need to download all your files from Google Photo's webpage, so make sure you have a estimator with ample disk infinite available. And then, we'll look at the procedure to upload those photos and videos to your network bulldoze.

Depending on the number of media files you're planning to move, y'all can either download the images manually or use Google Takeout. The former way works well if you lot just take a handful of files to download, though bear in heed that you'll be limited to 500 files in each become. Plus, you'll accept to select your media individually for each day since Photos on the spider web doesn't allow a broader yearly or even monthly view.

It'due south safe to assume that most of you lot have more than a few hundred photos and videos in Google Photos that you need to motion over to your Synology NAS. In that case, Google's data export tool Takeout should be the easiest way to have all your media files downloaded. Here's how you can do that:

  1. Go to photos.google.com on a calculator and click on the cog icon in the pinnacle-right corner to enter the settings page.
  2. Whorl down and expand the Export your data department and click on the Fill-in button against Backup and annal of your data.
  3. On the Takeout page, Google Photos should be the only pick, but if y'all run into other Google services on the list too, merely uncheck everything except for Google Photos and striking Next pace.
  4. Yous will run across a listing of folders marked by years along with some custom folders that Photos created for you. Check whatever folders y'all want to move to Synology and become to the next page.
  5. There, Google will let you option the backup frequency and the exported zero file'due south size. Since moving photos to Synology is going to be a one-off thing, I have selected single export and increased the file size to avoid getting multiple downloads. Yous can pick betwixt 1GB and 50GB from the drop-down menu. After that, click on Create consign.
  6. Depending on how much media you're exporting, you should receive the download link on your email accost inside a few minutes or hours. Once you lot get the email, click on the Download your files push and again striking the Download button on the next page. This download link remains agile for a week in instance something goes wrong.

Moving your photos and videos to a Synology NAS

Before you can upload your photos to a local Synology bulldoze, you volition have to dig into the downloaded folder and move around a few files to make it set. Only the process is pretty straightforward and doesn't take long. Bear in listen that the steps included here apply to Synology's latest DSM vii.0, so the procedure may vary for older versions.

  1. Open up the .nothing file you downloaded and open the Google Photos folder. In there, y'all'll find all the folders that y'all selected earlier when setting upward the export. These folders incorporate photos and videos from that year, along with .json files corresponding to each media file. These .json files carry some boosted metadata from Google Photos that is of no use in Synology's equivalent Photos app.
  2. To get rid of these files in one go, search .json in the Takeout folder, select them all, and toss them into the bin. At this point, you lot can also restructure the folder directory the way you want, but you don't necessarily need to do that since Synology Photos will arrange the images by date by default.
  3. Now open up your Synology NAS in a web browser and open File Station to locate the binder that is set up with the Synology Photos package. All you need to do here is drag the Google Photos binder and driblet it in there. Instead of accessing information technology from a web browser, y'all tin can alternatively use File Explorer or Finder if you've already linked your NAS to your computer's file director.
  4. The upload process tin take a while to stop depending on the binder size, following which Synology Photos will start processing your media files for indexing and its various Google Photos-inspired AI features. Once all this is done, your photos and videos should populate the Synology Photos spider web and phone apps simply equally they do on Google Photos.

Later on I moved my personal collection over to Synology, many of my older photos from various years concluded upwards appearing together nether the day I uploaded them. Apparently, Google Photos messed upward EXIF information on some of the images and replaced their original creation appointment with the date of the takeout. If something like this happens to you, attempt redownloading that twelvemonth's unabridged folder or the affected files individually before getting to correct the EXIF data manually every bit a last resort.

Left: Synology Photos, Right: Google Photos.

Synology Photos on DSM 7.0 has gotten much smarter than before, taking some heavy inspiration from Google Photos. That's the reason it turned out to be a worthy alternative to Google's app for my former colleague Rita, who dove deeper into the service to item how you lot tin can gear up automatic backups with Synology Photos. That should give y'all much more flexibility with unlimited full-size backups, given y'all've fabricated peace with the upfront cost.

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Karandeep Singh (440 Manufactures Published)

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