cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47534332
I have spent a long time at Synology Photos, along with my family. We have tags and albums. Is there a good way to migrate? I’m even open to migrating manually (album by album) if I could trust the process.
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I did this. I kept both.
I have Synology photos and immich.
Synology photo is faster to load photos when you scroll to a random date. Also on mobile, the map view is fast and reliable. Also the Android widget can show images of a specific person instead of a random photo.
Immich has better face detection and significantly better search tool. But is super laggy when you’re looking for a specific date and time and location.
My Synology is a DS 1821+ with dual nvme cache and 32gb mem My immich is running on a proxmox using a late model Xeon processor and NVME gen 3 and 32gb mem. Nothing else is running on the proxmox.
This is not a question of software (that answer will be yes, because you can then easily switch away from synology once it’s becoming bad) but instead a question of ability fo install it on your currently available hardware.
If you are able to utilize docker containers to the satisfaction of immichs guide? You should.The machine-learning face detection and picture search is amazing.
I have searched for “Shelf with black boxes” in german (the default context model is only english but they have multi language models) and it found the picture of the shelf with my black tea containers.
Or searching “food” brings up pictures of food and dishes, or “moon” of the moon. Honestly I am still amazed :)
(I also like the geo-tagged pictures on a map feature)I’ve kept both. Synology photos does auto upload from my+wife’s phones. Then Immich scans this as an external database to import.
Synology keeps the photos in a normal name and folder structure. So the files can be accessed and organised in a normal file browser. Moving to a different device or app is as simple as copying the files over. These folders are backed up off site so even if my hardware dies, I don’t have to set up Immich again before I can access the images as they’re normal image files.
Immich auto upload puts the photos into its own database that is not human readable. I didn’t want that. But I do want the AI tagging, search and fast browsing Immich has. If I didn’t already have Synology photos set up, then I might have tried using Syncthing to send photos to my NAS and then access through Immich.
If you have all of the photos, then you could use a tool like Immich Go, which would automate much of the tagging and album creation. I don’t know if Immich Go accounts for metadata from Synology. However, Synology might be able to export everything.
I would also recommend putting Immich remote access behind Tailscale (I.e., pointing the remove access server to your tailnet and using that domain name and the Immich port to login).
Thank you! Can you ELI5, where is immich-go installed? On my new Immich server (unraid), on my Synology? On an intermediate device?
Madness it would be best to put Immich on my Synology for the transfer, then move to Unraid?
I’m trying to change 2 things - moving photos from Synology Photos to Immich and also moving the while operation from Synology to Unraid, but maybe it’s a 2 step process?
Can you ELI5, where is immich-go installed? On my new Immich server (unraid), on my Synology? On an intermediate device?
Shouldn’t matter, as long as the device running immich-go can access your photos (locally or over a network share) and the web api of your immich instance.
Madness it would be best to put Immich on my Synology for the transfer, then move to Unraid?
I don’t see how this would be easier as it later adds an extra step, where you have to move immich from your Synology to Unraid. However, if you have to deal with a slow or unreliable network between those two hosts, it could make sense.
I’m trying to change 2 things - moving photos from Synology Photos to Immich and also moving the while operation from Synology to Unraid, but maybe it’s a 2 step process?
Yes, do yourself a favour and split these tasks. Migrate your photos to immich first, shut down Synology Photos and test that everything works as expected, then go on with your remaining migration to Unraid.
I am a fan of Immich but know nothing about Synology. Does Synology have a subscription or something? Immich has done a much better job at tagging things and putting them in to albums than Apple’s Photos ever did for me, it took the stuff that Apple had tagged and than did a much better job.
a lot of the posts about Immich are a few years old. has it improved?
What a question… :D
Anyway: YES.
I’d go as far as to say, it’s infamous state of being fragile as fuck, every update is a breaking change and needing to read every changelog before updating is a bit outdated.
But they are still working on it quite a bit.I only really started getting deep into self hosting when the orange guy started threatening to make Canada the 51st state. So that is when I found immich, not sure how far I was into Lemmy when I found it but I have no complaints.
I’ve used it for a few years and it is an excellent application. I used Synology Photos for about a day before moving on.
Synology is not a subscription, and comes w/ Synology device. It is fine but is missing some features. Moving is a bear though so maybe I should make sure it’s really worth it.
You can set up immich to use external libraries.
It can ingest your current library without changing anything in the folder structure and it will be alongside it.
Just make sure to check the external library configuration and immichs documentation before doing anything.Also make sure you have a backup :p That doesnt hurt either way
Moving should be fairly simple really.
Make a docker container and point Immich to the photo directory.
If I’m not mistaken, Immich copies the photos and sorts them, so you should be able to run both setups simultaneously without touching the Synology setup.
Some Synology devices aren’t capable of dealing with docker containers. Just to keep that in mind.
Just stand it up and copy over a sample set. It’ll take like two hours tops. Play around and see if you like it. I did it and had the fancy features working right out of the box.
If you’ve used Google Photos, it’s almost an exact clone.
