Synology's new photo app "Moments"

[Paul Barrett]

(Apologies for the double post but I posted in the Daminion Server thread by mistake.)

I mentioned this new app in some earlier posts and said i would come back with some information, when known.

 

I have been testing it for about 6 weeks now. I gave it a thorough soak test by copying my entire Daminion Library contents into Moments and then compared it to Synology Photo Station, and to Daminion to a lesser extent.

 

So, how does it compare?

 

The headline is that, for the typical Daminion home user it doesn't. End of. It's target audience is the smartphone user with a tiny library and little need or desire to organise it.

 

From a Photo Station perspective it's also a different paradigm.

• Photo Station uses a central library concept (which is why it is a good companion to Daminion)
• Moments' Library is buried deep within a user's home directory. I haven't tried linking to it from Daminion but I know it will be even more challenging, not the least because you can't map it as a network drive
• It is private by default whereas Photo Station is open.
• You can issue public shares, but only a the level of an individual photo
• A link to a photo gallery for a subject requires you to login to Moments which rules it out dor my family history site where I link to photo galleries for individuals.
• Photo Station's metadata data management is poor. Moments' is even worse.

Other issues:

• Moments Face recognition is far superior to Photo Station's. It is quicker and much more accurate
• But when it misidentifies a face there's no way to correct it
• It has auto subject recognition
• But the categories are not ones likely to appeal to Daminion users
• And they are very, very inaccurate
• It recognises GPS data embedded in an image and tries to assign a place label based on that info.
• But it does a terrible job, producing labels that bear little relation to the actual place
• It recognises keywords generated by Daminion
• But, just like Photo Station, it doesn't handle hierarchical keywords
• All of these categories, Face, Place, Subject, Keyword Tags, are presented in random order with no ability to sort them
• It doesn't parse the Date / Time Original filed correctly and when it fails to do so, falls back to the Date / Time Modified for sorting purposes, which means that photos that are dated 1904 appear in the timeline as 2017.

Conclusions:

1. It's no replacement for Photo Station
2. It can't link to Daminion
3. There's still a crying need for a Synology Daminion package