Synology Moments: The NAS app that makes pictures better
9.10.2018
Translation: machine translated
DS Photo was good. Synology Moments is better. The new app blows its predecessor out of the water. A look at an app that has it all.
Synology is in a state of flux. New apps are replacing old apps. The new ones are rebranded. No more "DS" for "Disk Station". The apps are now all called "Synology $name". They are more modern, more pleasant and more intelligent.
I missed probably the best of these apps and the successor to DS Photo in my recent NAS article. Fortunately, a reader brought it to my attention.
Also be sure to add the Synology Moments app. A good alternative to other photo cloud services, thanks to image recognition (on your own NAS, not a Google server in the USA), the photos are sorted by person, location or other topics.
Thank you, Anonymous. Let's take a closer look at the app.
DS Photo, but smarter
You already know many of the app's functions from the big Cloud Photo Business apps. The app is similar to Google Photos in terms of layout. The largely white understatement of the layout is good for the abundance of images. This is how your pictures shine, not the pretty website.
The app works similarly, looks and feels similar to Google Photos. The main screen organises the images by date, with the scrollbar on the side organised by date
Synology Moments also recognises faces, but does not sort them automatically. This is quite pleasant, because Google's approach of "I'll correlate everything with social media of all kinds" is not quite as flawless as I would like it to be. A face on a poster in the background is automatically recognised as a person and the like. I don't know Alden Ehrenreich as young Han Solo personally after all.
However, the face recognition in Synology Moments is not particularly advanced. In the following image, the software does not recognise a face
Source: Thomas Kunz
I can't add faces manually either. So Anne will forever remain unsung in the photo.
But if a face is recognised, I can create a NAS-internal database of people, which then recognises all faces with a high degree of accuracy. Biathlete and young journalist Vivienne Sommer is recognised cleanly, even easily from the side and sorted in.
Since Synology does not correlate the data, you have to do it yourself. Moments recognises the face, but not the person. Therefore, you have to name the person yourself.
From this, Moments generates a person database.
The problem with all the apps
As much as Synology does right with the design of its apps, the Taiwanese company gets it wrong when it comes to naming them. Recently, I briefly reviewed the obvious candidates for the apps, simply looking at the standard apps that seemed obvious. These included DS Photo, the predecessor Moments. The problem: there are now two apps in the App Store that essentially fulfil the same function.
I wonder why on earth this is necessary. If Moments is the better DS Photo, then the app could just replace its predecessor, couldn't it? But no, I have to install a separate application on the NAS, then move or re-upload all the pictures. That's just useless work.
Behind the scenes, the files look exactly the same, they are simply sorted differently. DS Photo is sorted by albums in the NAS's own file browser called File Station. Moments, however, by data. This is rather strange, as it is easy to dynamically read files in a folder system and sort them according to any uniform criteria. Date, location, time, file size... anything goes. Even Windows Explorer can do this.
My suggestion: Get rid of DS Photo, or revamp DS Photo to Moments. Because as much as I liked DS Photo, DS Moments blows the comparatively old and poor app out of the water. <p
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
