Synology Photo Station

[Paul Barrett]

UPDATE 1st Oct 2018

The Synology Help section has been completely reworked to make it shorter, more useful and easier to navigate

 

Daminion and Synology Integration (it takes a while to load. I am working on that)

 

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A new section called Synology Photo Station has been added to the Daminion Help system.

 

It is aimed at prosumers who use Daminion to manage the metadata of their photo library but want to share those images online with friends and family. Without a Windows Server you cannot access the Daminion web app, which is a shame because it is a great interface and allows you to exploit so much of Daminion’s cataloguing capabilities.

 

If you own a Synology DiskStation then Synology’s packaged solution, Photo Station, can provide a good web publishing solution. It’s not as good as Daminion’s but I believe it is the best alternative for owners of a Synology DiskStation.

 

These help articles are not official Daminion content but were written by me based on my experiences in setting up my installation of Daminion and Photo Station. I hope they are useful.

 

If you find any errors, have questions or comments, or like the content, please feel free to post comments here and I’ll do my best to answer them.

 

 

 

Paul Barrett

[Paul Barrett]

Issue Resolved

We are aware of an issue with link titles and headings being struck through like this.

 

All the links appear to work. We are investigating....

 

Paul

[rau]

Hi Paul - I too have a Synology NAS, so plan to take a look at your doco and see if your solution is a good fit for me. I do approach it with a little trepidation as I recall previous tinkering found it impossibly slow if using the /photo share. I gave up and instead just used the NAS for basis storage (with Raid/disk mirroring).

 

Out of interest, did you every try out the now defunct Windows Photo Gallery?

[Paul Barrett]

Hi Paul - I too have a Synology NAS, so plan to take a look at your doco and see if your solution is a good fit for me. I do approach it with a little trepidation as I recall previous tinkering found it impossibly slow if using the /photo share. I gave up and instead just used the NAS for basis storage (with Raid/disk mirroring).

 

Out of interest, did you every try out the now defunct Windows Photo Gallery?

 

No, I never tried Bindows PG.

 

a) What model is your Disk Station?

 

b) How many photos in your library?

 

Paul

 

 

[lintujuh]

Windows Essential 2012 packet that has the Windows PG is at end-of-life and no longer available for download https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13785/essentials-2012-release-notes.

 

-Juha

[rau]

Windows Essential 2012 packet that has the Windows PG is at end-of-life and no longer available for download https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13785/essentials-2012-release-notes.

 

-Juha

Right - hence my description of it as defunct.

[rau]

No, I never tried Bindows PG.

 

a) What model is your Disk Station?

 

b) How many photos in your library?

 

Paul

I have a DS212 and DS410. I have around 15,000 images and video clips though much culling is needed. The images/videos reside on the 212 (mirrored disks).

[Paul Barrett]

I have a DS212 and DS410. I have around 15,000 images and video clips though much culling is needed. The images/videos reside on the 212 (mirrored disks).

 

Sorry or very late reply. You library is very similar to mine except I have very little video. The 212 will be slow to index the images.

 

My 216j took 36 hours to convert and index 16K images. I recently bought a 716+II. That does the same job in under 30 minutes.

 

 

[vongoesseln]

Sorry or very late reply. You library is very similar to mine except I have very little video. The 212 will be slow to index the images.

 

My 216j took 36 hours to convert and index 16K images. I recently bought a 716+II. That does the same job in under 30 minutes.

 

716+II Great choice. I bought a 716+ three weeks before the "II" model has been released, but it still is a great choice. Despite the guarantee issue, i´ve installed 8GB of RAM by myself and now this machine runs even better.

[Paul Barrett]

Hi Guido

 

I just bought a 916+ so I could add hot spare capability. It's an ex-demo unit direct from Synology UK at a bargain price. I just missed out on a 916+ 8GB model and have been thinking about doing the manual upgrade. As I understand it they will turn a blind eye unless you have a problem, at which point you will need to refit the original 2GB module that was installed with the product,

 

So if the VM takes 6 GB of RAM, that leaves the original 2GB for other purposes which sounds fair enough..

 

1. Any other performance issues?

2. What Windows version did you install, and a what cost?

3. How responsive is the Daminion web server

4. Is this a viable option?

 

Regards

 

Paul

[vongoesseln]

Hi Guido

 

I just bought a 916+ so I could add hot spare capability. It's an ex-demo unit direct from Synology UK at a bargain price. I just missed out on a 916+ 8GB model and have been thinking about doing the manual upgrade. As I understand it they will turn a blind eye unless you have a problem, at which point you will need to refit the original 2GB module that was installed with the product,

 

So if the VM takes 6 GB of RAM, that leaves the original 2GB for other purposes which sounds fair enough..

 

1. Any other performance issues?

2. What Windows version did you install, and a what cost?

3. How responsive is the Daminion web server

4. Is this a viable option?

 

Regards

 

Paul

 

Hi Paul,

 

1) so far i did not face any performance issues, but the harddisk has a lot more to do, and therefore the machine gets louder, not the fans but the diskdrives.

 

2) I installed Windows 10 Pro. Did you mean the price? There was a very nice offer, so i received the Win 10 license for 19,90 EUR (incl. TAX).

 

3) Actually i am waiting for the home server test license and the upgrade offer. Because i only have the standard 25000 images license, from the good ol´times, when daminion offered products for non-commercial persons directly on the website. Without an "good" offer for the Home license i would not even test any further.

 

4) Don´t know by now, i will get to you, if i know.

 

Regards Guido

 

P.S.: Actually i am quite disappointed about the answers we get from daminion. Especially the "non" answers for the feature request part in the forum makes me go hmmm. And no further infos about face recognition???

[Paul Barrett]

P.S.: Actually i am quite disappointed about the answers we get from daminion. Especially the "non" answers for the feature request part in the forum makes me go hmmm. And no further infos about face recognition???

 

We can only speculate as to what's going on. It seems to have gone quiet on many fronts and the product has stagnated. My stupid wild arsed guess is that they are working on a cloud offering of their own. Whether that's true and whether it will be priced at a level existing home users can afford is yet another guess.

 

 

Since I have yet to see a face recognition function that actually works (and bear in mind how many people are not shown full face anyway) I really don't care about FR. I am content to manually tag people. It's less effort and more accurate AFAIAC

 

Paul

[rau]

Since I have yet to see a face recognition function that actually works (and bear in mind how many people are not shown full face anyway) I really don't care about FR. I am content to manually tag people. It's less effort and more accurate AFAIAC

 

Paul

Well, I don't know about that..... Good ole (but now withdrawn by Microsoft) Windows Photo Gallery offers face recognition that's pretty useful. Tag several faces of the same person or set of people, then invoke the "batch tagging" function and WPG presents a pile of thumbnails of faces that it believes might match a person you've tagged. You can quickly select those it got right and voila - it tags them all. With a well-implemented user interface, it's a real big timesaver, despite far from perfect accuracy. It always asks you to confirm people. Of course, its suggestion is often wrong, it recognises things that are not faces at all, and it fails to detect the presence of some faces (let along assess the correct person), but it is still surprisingly effective and a big timesaver. It is really a shame Daminion doesn't have this feature.

[rau]

Paul - Your Help instructions specify to create a Catalog. When I fired up Daminion, there seemed to be one already established: DaminionCatalog.dmc (and already there are 8 backup variants of it!) This is located under a parent folder "Daminion Catalogs" in the Documents folder.

 

A couple of questions:

1) Is there any reason why one may not change the name of this Catalog (using File Explorer) to something more appropriate (though if I take you advice and have exactly ONE catalog and no more, this name is as good as any!)?

 

2) Daminion online help info suggests the Catalog should be located "with" the Image assets, so the image assets can be relocated (with the catalog) easily at any time, and without upsetting the links from Catalog to Image files. However, with assets on the NAS, am I right to believe the Catalog needs to stay on the local computer, and not on the NAS (due to some risk of corruption of similar?)

 

Rgds

[Paul Barrett]

1) Is there any reason why one may not change the name of this Catalog (using File Explorer) to something more appropriate (though if I take you advice and have exactly ONE catalog and no more, this name is as good as any!)?

I have never tried renaming a catalog. Try it and see what happens. You will have to open it manually afterwards

 

 

2) Daminion online help info suggests the Catalog should be located "with" the Image assets, so the image assets can be relocated (with the catalog) easily at any time, and without upsetting the links from Catalog to Image files. However, with assets on the NAS, am I right to believe the Catalog needs to stay on the local computer, and not on the NAS (due to some risk of corruption of similar?)

When using a NNAS, put the files on the NAS and the catalog on your PC.

 

You might want to consider using Synology Drive IFyou have enough space on your computer to sync the files locally. See this article

 

 

Paul

 

 

 

 

 

[Mike*V]

A new section called Synology Photo Station has been added to the Daminion Help system.

 

It is aimed at prosumers who use Daminion to manage the metadata of their photo library but want to share those images online with friends and family. Without a Windows Server you cannot access the Daminion web app, which is a shame because it is a great interface and allows you to exploit so much of Daminion’s cataloguing capabilities.

 

If you own a Synology Disk Station then Synology’s packaged solution, Photo Station, can provide a good web publishing solution. It’s not as good as Daminion’s but I believe it is the best alternative for owners of a Synology Disk Station.

 

These help articles are not official Daminion content but were written by me based on my experiences in setting up my installation of Daminion and Photo Station. I hope they are useful.

 

If you find any errors, have questions or comments, or like the content, please feel free to post comments here and I’ll do my best to answer them.

 

 

 

Paul Barrett

 

Paul,

 

I've been reading your excellent material on Synology. Since my catalog includes hundreds of home video clips, I was wondering if you would suggest any differences in your photo-centric approach that would include Synology's "Video Station"?

 

I have the DS718+ with two 10 TB drives and want to make some videos (and photos) accessible on the Web.

[Paul Barrett]

Paul,

 

I've been reading your excellent material on Synology. Since my catalog includes hundreds of home video clips, I was wondering if you would suggest any differences in your photo-centric approach that would include Synology's "Video Station"?

 

I have the DS718+ with two 10 TB drives and want to make some videos (and photos) accessible on the Web.

 

For some reason that I have never investigated due to my lack of interest in video, Synology effectively have two products that can handle video, "Video Station" and "Photo Station"

 

Yes, Photo Station can also handle video. If I were you I would see if Photo Station can handle you video needs. Perhaps you have?

 

I'll install video station and see how it compares. I won't be able to do much because I have very little content

 

Paul

 

 

 

[Paul Barrett]

Video Station is clearly a media centre. For example it handles playlists and segregates movies from tv, home video and tv recording.

 

If you have a lot of these types of content it's clearly superior to Photo Station.

 

But I could see no way of tagging, so I suspect it doesn't support keywords at all.

 

My gut instinct is, if you have a mixture of photos and home videos, the benefit of accessing them all through a single interface may outweigh the slicker handling of Video Station

[Mike*V]

Video Station is clearly a media centre. For example it handles playlists and segregates movies from tv, home video and tv recording.

 

If you have a lot of these types of content it's clearly superior to Photo Station.

 

But I could see no way of tagging, so I suspect it doesn't support keywords at all.

 

My gut instinct is, if you have a mixture of photos and home videos, the benefit of accessing them all through a single interface may outweigh the slicker handling of Video Station

Thanks, Paul.

 

I really like Daminion's single interface for photos and videos. As soon as I learn enough to set up my NAS for system backup plus cloud sharing plus file storage plus photo/video management, I'll try your suggestion.

 

I hope I can use the keywords in all of the xmp files for the video clips.

 

Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

 

Mike

[Mike*V]

Thanks, Paul.

 

I really like Daminion's single interface for photos and videos. As soon as I learn enough to set up my NAS for system backup plus cloud sharing plus file storage plus photo/video management, I'll try your suggestion.

 

I hope I can use the keywords in all of the xmp files for the video clips.

 

Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

 

Mike

Paul,

 

It appears that none of this will work for me. According to a comment in the Synology forum, Photo Station will not read keywords in xmp sidecar files, where all of my keywords are saved for hundreds of video clips. These are video files that cannot hold metadata.

 

"Hi, I don't think the Photo Station wil ever read the external XMP sidecar files. Sorry."

 

Do you think there might be a way to use Daminion's client to remotely access media stored on the DiskStation?

 

Mike

[Paul Barrett]

Hi Mike

 

I'm so sorry. I meant to mention about sidecars. My bad.

 

You can use Daminion to manage your metadata on a Diskstation and if you use Drive you would have local copies to access when you are remote. but the PC client version is not intended to be a media player.

 

I don't know whether there are any media players that will read the sidecar files and let you use that metadata to organise your videos.

 

What exactly are you trying to do please Mike?

[Paul Barrett]

Just a quick note to say the Synology Help has been completely reorganised to make it shorter and more useful. See Main post at the top of this thread.

 

Paul

[Mike*V]

Paul,  I'm getting this error on the way to your Help page: 

Error!
We could not verify the the security token. Please try again.

Mike

[Paul Barrett]

Sorry 

16 hours ago, Mike*V said:

Paul,  I'm getting this error on the way to your Help page: 

Error!
We could not verify the the security token. Please try again.

Mike

Sorry about that.  Some plugin updates basically wrecked the site. 😞

I think I have corrected it now.

[Mike*V]

On 12/6/2019 at 8:56 AM, Paul Barrett said:

Sorry 

Sorry about that.  Some plugin updates basically wrecked the site. 😞

I think I have corrected it now.

You did.  Thank you!