Synology Moments First Experience

I now have a nice, big Synology NAS. Synology’s new photo app, Moments, aims to be a replacement for Google Photos, which sounds like a great plan. I’ve been using Google Photos since it launched but it gives me the creeps having so much of my life under Google’s watchful eye.

Jumping right in, I imported all 79,000 photos from Google Photos into Moments. The import didn’t take as long as I expected. The indexing and thumbnail creation process, however, took days. Once everything finished I started poking around the Moments app.

It’s kind of a mess.

So many of the dates are wrong on the imported photos that the word “moments” doesn’t really apply. I get that some of the source files are film scans, so the exif data can get wonky, but they’re not wonky in Google Photos. In Moments they appear to be almost entirely random. It’s kind of useless.

The iOS app for Moments only sort of works. I continually get “Operation failed” messages, and the timeline isn’t even the same as the web version. Not sure how that’s even possible. I am running the iOS 12 beta so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Browsing Moments is slow. Even on the LAN, it’s laggy.

Facial recognition is fair, but not as good as Google’s. There were 10 or 12 different groupings of some people that I had to merge manually.

Moments' search index doesn’t seem to include file names. I carefully name every file for the very purpose of helping find things. Not being able to search the file name makes some sense, since most people probably just automatically back up iPhone photos, but it’s a significant drawback for me. I don’t want to search for “Dog”, I want to search for “Josie in the car”. I can’t do that in Moments.

As it stands, I’m not going to fullfill my dream of ditching Google Photos for Moments.