How to move your media from Google Photos to a Synology NAS

Google Photos has truly been the gold standard for gallery apps, with its numerous smart features and capabilities. But when Google decided to stop offering free unlimited high-quality media uploads — a big draw for many Photos users — people started to look for alternatives. One substitute that stands out is Synology Photos, which comes bundled with the company’s NAS servers, offering virtually unlimited full-res uploads for your photos and videos.

The Synology app got a major facelift, complete with several AI-enabled capabilities akin to Google Photos, right around the time when Google decided to discontinue unlimited high-quality uploads in its app. With its new interface, Synology Photos became one of our favorite Google Photos alternatives. If you are looking to move your media from Google Photos to Synology Photos, here’s a step-by-step-guide to get you started.

The good

The not-so-good

Before we begin

Synology Photos is completely free to use if you own a Synology NAS server. While the app does save you from spending a monthly subscription fee on apps like Google One, the entry price could be pretty substantial (depending on the NAS model and the storage capacity you opt for) if you plan to pick up a new network storage server.

For instance, the DiskStation DS220+ alone costs $300, while with the whole package, including a pair of HDDs, you could be looking at an initial investment of $500. It doesn’t make sense to get a NAS only for Synology Photos; you’d be better off paying $100 a year for Google’s 2TB storage plan.

However, if you’re going to use the NAS for other things, having access to Synology Photos is a nice bonus. And there’s so much more that you can do with a Synology NAS, from setting up a media server to having your own surveillance station. Synology NAS also has some neat tools that make it suitable for home offices and even enable collaboration for small teams.

The new Synology Photos app works only with Synology’s latest NAS management software — DSM 7.0. If you’ve purchased a new server, it’s going to come preinstalled with the latest DSM version. But if you’re using an older NAS device, make sure to update the DSM version before you proceed.

Moving your photos and videos from Google Photos to a Synology NAS

There are two ways that you can move your media files from Google Photos to Synology Photos: an automated and manual process. We’ll start with the automatic sync tool, which works well, but has some limitations that we’ll talk about later on.

Using the automated method

With Synology Cloud Sync, you can automate the process of syncing your photos from Google Drive to Google Photos. You’ll need to first install Cloud Sync on your NAS and then link it with your Google account. Here’s how you do it:

1. From the Package Center, install the app called Cloud Sync. Once done, open it and select Google Drive and click on Next.
2. On the pop-up window, sign in to the Google account where all your Google Photos are, and then allow Cloud Sync to access your Google Drive. Click on Agree on the next page.
3. It will take you back to the DSM page, from where you can set up a new sync task. Among the options, Local path is the folder on your NAS where you want to store your files from Google Photos, while Remote path is the source folder in Google Drive that you want to sync. Assign these folders, set how you want the sync to work from Sync direction, and hit Next.
4. Give your selections one last look before clicking on Done.

You can check the sync status from the Cloud Sync app. Depending on the size of your library, the sync can take between a few seconds to a few hours. Once it’s complete, the selected destination folder will populate with your photos, which will then also show up in Synology Photos.

Since Google stopped syncing Google Photos to a specific Google Drive folder in 2019, you won’t be able to sync anything added to Google Photos after that point. The best way would be to sync everything only until 2018, just so you don’t have to mess with exact dates, and use the more capable manual way for everything you’ve photographed since 2019.

Using the manual method

Moving your media from Google Photos to a Synology DiskStation manually is a two-part process. You’ll first need to download all your files from the Google Photos website, so make sure you have a computer with ample disk space available. Once you’ve downloaded your media, we’ll look at how to upload it to your Synology NAS.

Downloading media from Google Photos

Depending on the number of media files you plan to move, you can either download the images manually or use Google Takeout. The former works well if you only have less than 500 hundred files to deal with. That said, manually downloading images can be tedious; you’ll have to select your media for each day since Photos on the web doesn’t offer a monthly or yearly view.

It’s safe to assume that most of you have more than a few hundred photos and videos in Google Photos that you need to move over to your Synology NAS. In that case, Google Takeout is the easiest way to download your media. Here’s how you use it:

1. Go to photos.google.com on a computer and click on the cog icon in the top-right corner to enter the settings page.
2. Scroll down and expand the Export your data section and click on the Backup button against Backup and archive of your data.

3. On the Takeout page, Google Photos should be the only option, but if you see other Google services on the list as well, just uncheck everything except for Google Photos and hit Next step.
4. You will see a list of folders marked by years along with some custom folders that Photos created for you. Check whatever folders you want to move to Synology and go to the next page.
5. There, Google will let you pick the backup frequency and the exported zip file’s 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. You can pick between 1GB and 50GB from the drop-down menu. After that, click on Create export.
6. Depending on how much media you’re exporting, you should receive a download link via email within a few minutes or hours. Once you get the email, click on the Download your files button and again hit the Download button on the next page. This download link remains active for a week in case something goes wrong.

Moving your photos and videos to a Synology NAS

Before you can upload your photos to a local Synology drive, you will have to dig into the downloaded folder and move around a few files. The process is straightforward and fast. Keep in mind that the steps included here apply to Synology’s latest DSM 7.0, so the process may vary for older versions.

1. Open the .zip file you downloaded and open the Google Photos folder. In there, you’ll find all the folders that you selected earlier when setting up the export. These folders contain photos and videos from that year, along with .json files corresponding to each media file. These .json files carry some additional metadata from Google Photos that is of no use in Synology’s equivalent Photos app.
2. To get rid of these files in one fell swoop, search for .json in the Takeout folder, select them all, and toss them into the bin. At this point, you 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 your Synology NAS in a web browser and open File Station to locate the folder that is set up with the Synology Photos package. All you need to do here is drag the Google Photos folder and drop it in there. Instead of accessing it from a web browser, you can alternatively use File Explorer or Finder if you’ve already linked your NAS to your computer’s file manager.
4. The upload process can take a while to finish depending on the folder 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 web and phone apps just as they do on Google Photos.

If you notice a group of photos are categorized with the incorrect date, there’s a change Google Takeout flubbed the EXIF data. Try downloading the affected folders or images again; if a second download fails to fix the issue, you may need to update the metadata for each image manually.

Setting up the Synology Photos app on Android

Once you’ve moved your entire library to Synology Photos, it’s time to install its Android app. This is where you’ll see most of the features that have been borrowed from Google Photos. The app is also a more accessible way to see your photos than visiting the web interface through DSM.

On the first install, you will be asked to enter your NAS’s local IP address or its QuickConnect ID and your login details. Punch those details, and you’d be in. The interface will quickly populate all the photos you just uploaded through the web UI using the steps above.

Getting acquainted with Synology Photos

Left: Synology Photos, Right: Google Photos.

Right away, you will notice that the interface looks very similar to Google Photos, down to the pinch to zoom option on the home page and the menu bar at the bottom. The similarities will allow you to quickly adapt to the Synology Photos app when switching from Google’s counterpart. All the options are where you expect them to be, and the bottom bar is also nicely laid out to avoid any confusion.

You can club together a bunch of photos together in albums, which will be accessible through the Albums tab at the bottom. That’s also where you’ll find your media files tagged by faces and places. Synology’s AI here isn’t as adept as Google’s just yet, so you may notice a few slip-ups with duplicate or wrong facial tags, which you’ll have to fix manually.

From the sharing tab, you can see and control the media files you’ve shared with others either on the network or externally. The app lets you share individual photos or albums with other accounts on the NAS or with any specific user groups you may have created. There’s also a way to share your library with a publicly accessible link. And if you ever want to show those photos to your family on a big screen, you can beam them to a Chromecast through the Android app.

Since the capacity of Synology Photos is limited only by the storage capacity of your NAS, you can easily back up your media in full resolution. You can also set up automatic backups on your phone that works just like it’s on Google Photos.

How to set up automatic backup

Setting up automatic backup on Synology Photos is pretty straightforward. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Tap on More (the hamburger menu), select Photo Backup, and then tap on Enable Photo Backup.
2. Select Backup Destination and Backup Source folders, and tap on Done at the top.

And just like that, your media will start backing up to Synology Photos. Under the backup settings in the app, you also have the option to free up the space your backed-up media files are taking on the phone, similar to what you get on Google Photos.

Should you ditch Google Photos?

No. Even though photo backups count against your Drive storage, Google Photos remains the smartest and perhaps the most well-rounded photos app for Android and iOS. It integrates well with the larger Google ecosystem, allowing you to cast your photos on a TV just by asking the Google Assistant or use those photos as backgrounds for Chromecasts or your Nest Hub screens. Plus, sharing is far more seamless since most internet users on the planet already have a Google account.

The arrangement that has worked best for most is to use Synology Photos and Google Photos simultaneously. Back up your photos to Google Photos in the storage saver mode, and use the app access your photos and peek at those nostalgic highlights that it generates. Meanwhile, the Synology app is reserved for backing up full-res copies of your photos and videos, and can be used when you need to move photos in an instant.

There’s absolutely nothing that can come close to Google Photos in terms of all the smarts it has to offer and the new features that keep coming. But the flexibility Synology Photos app offers over Google Photos with free unlimited full-res backup is also unmatched. If you already own a Synology NAS, using Synology Photos is a no-brainer, especially since the one-time setup process isn’t all that complicated, and you can even have a similar setup for Synology Drive as well.

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