Background

In this last post I want to focus on what it takes to migrate my photos to Immich. And if it is time to let go of Synology photos. This is just some of the things that matters for me. There might be many other things that is important for you and your choice. I have used Photos since a long time. First Photo station, Moments and now Photos. There are still some features I miss from Photostation.

Features comparison

Below I will look at some features

Conditional albums

This is something that I use a lot. It is an absolute deal breaker for me. So what it is and why do we need it? I use this in many situations. I will provide some examples.

1. I take a lot of sports photos for my kids. When I import images I tag them with the team name. All photos end up in the same album.
2. Drones. I take drone photos. In this case the condition is the camera model. I get all the new photos to be automatically assigned to this album.
3. In the example below I have me as a person. I also have the subject boats. Now I can share this with a friend if I like and make this album public. They will always be able to get auto updates of all the latest photos assigned to this album. Most likely this is more suitable for the sports albums shared with other parents.

Below is the result.

So how does this work in Immich? Well, not at all to be honest. I know this is the roadmap and as we know thing happens fast. Below I add an album, select photos and give it a name. If I share the album and add more photos later I suppose they will be shared but it is just to much manual work.

🏅 Winner: Synology Photos

Metadata

This is something that is crucial in order to manage your photos. And there is far more then just geotagging. In general there are three ways of saving information about your image.

• In the file itself
• In a file, generally called sidecar file. Can be xml or .sidecar
• In a database. Like postgres (In the Image program)

Some people would say it is a bad idea to modify the original files by adding metadata. Let´s say you add RAW images from your camera. Most likely you do not want to touch the original file. In this case a sidecar file might be good.

If you add tags in Immich or Photos the info will be stored in a database. The reason is both because you do not want to tamper with the original file. And there is also a great performance boost by reading the info from the database and not from the file. So lets say I decided to move all my files to another system. The tags in Photos will NOT be imported to the new system as the info is not in the file. And there is no sidecar files. However if I have sidecar files (like importing from my Sony camera) and add both files to Immich or Photos the metadata will be read and imported. Below is the properties of an image. I have tags, title and subject. If you import this files tags should be imported. However this did not work when testing in Immich. Not sure why?

So changing metadata in Immich or Synology Photos could be a good idea if you are aware that all info is stored in the database. If image is moved tags may be lost. I have mostly used Adobe Bridge in order to import images. It is free and you can set up templates. If I have a template adding a tag like “soccer” this tag will be used in at least Synology Phots and is added automatically to my conditional album. Works perfect. The original image is modified.

There are many other settings for other fields.

• Exif (Camera settings mostly)
• Xmp (sometimes in a sidecar file, more flexible)
• Iptc (more basic and stored in image. Usually info like description,keywords)
• Dicom (Medical photos, you do not need to know this)

So in general my tip would be to save tags in the file. Use something like Bridge or similar. Read this great article if you want to deep dive into metadata. Lets look into these two old photos. One has description in the image. The other had most likely a note somewhere that now is lost. How long will your sidecar files exist? Do your wife or kids know what a sidecarfile is?

So this AI genrated image could be an example. I would say the note is about 99% to get lost. Consider the note the sidecar file or the database and the photo behind the actual jpg file.

Or use the fantastic tool Exiftool (or Exiftool gui) to read all metadata info on your files.

So what can we see in Immich and Photos? Lets compare. Below is an image taken with a mobile. I do have the basic info. the Immich docs tells me there should be a sidecar file as well but I do not see any after modifying any image.

And in Photos. There is far more info here.

There is also an issue in Photos about reading heic metadata but not sure how this works. When I add metadata in Bridge and import the image the tags are shown in Photos.

So this was a long text but metadata is important. I would prefer that Immich could show me all details. Not sure why that is not the case. Tags is not good in Photos either but still better. I guess Immich uses the metadata for search and as the search is fantastic I suppose it works good. However I miss the view.

🏅Winner: Synology Photos.

Browsing

This heading may be a little hard to understand. I do not know how you access and manage your photos but in my case I do it in some different ways.

Browser

Browser – This works fine in both applications. The main issue I have with Immich is that I can not browse via folder. I have tagged my images but not all of them. Some are a folder like “my visit in africa”. In Photos I can browse via albums or photos (folders). In some cases if not using external libraries this wont matter as the filestructure in your containers mount for upload is quite hard to understand anyway.

I also have the “recently added” uploads categories in Photos. In Immich it is sorted by date taken.

Explorer

I do use the windows explorer to. I might connect my drone to my computer via usb and then I upload 100 photos and drag them to my share. In Immich I would have to create a share on my linux server. I suppose I could use folders but I does not make much sense.

Mobile & TV

It works fine on both Photos and Immich. I suppose the strength of Immich is the development speed. If there is one issue that I have had in the past is https. So make sure your ssl certificates is working. You will get issues otherwise. One great thing is that if you have a Google TV the apps will be available here as well. It is nice to be able to browse on your TV. I also use the internal media app of my LG TV.

🏅Winner: Synology Photos.

Installation and maintenance

Lets be honest. I would not recommend any of my friends to use either Immich or Photos. Use a paid cloud service. There are so many things to consider so the average person will not be able to handle this. If you are a little more of a tech person Synology might be a good choice. But even simple things like https might be overwhelming.

If you read something that you can set up Immich in 10 minutes it is a lie. You will need good understanding of Linux, Docker and other troubleshooting skills. As it is not stable expect sudden unexpected errors.

🏅Winner: Synology Photos.

Development / Roadmap

So what can you say? Synology has released 17 versions since June 2021. There are no killer features. Immich has a roadmap and changelog. The development is extremely fast right now and considering how new it is I am sure a lot of changes are on the way. In one way this could be a problem as there are so many breaking changes. I would really recommend to wait for the stable version.

This is the Synology versions so far. 1.0.0-0182 (2021-06-01) ->1.7.0-0794 (2024-08-26)

I would also like to mention that immich has so many contributors. 847 right now in October 2024. It has almost 50k stars on Github. And it is open source. I do not know how many people that are working with Photos but a wild guess would be a few.

🏅Winner: Immich

Search, Face detection and AI

If you have loads of videos and photos there is a big chance you might have troubles finding the one you are looking for. I know I took this image 2001 but it might have been 2005. And that camera did not have any geo tagging so you might be up for a challenge. Non tech persons (as well as old people) tend to organize files in folders. I did the same. But if you move, share or change something the idea is lost.

Now with AI and machine learning you are able to search for persons, subjects or places. This works for both. But Immich does this far better. It is also super fast. I did some test.

Floorball is called innebandy in Sweden. It is a very popular sport. Like indoor hockey. The result in Photos below.

Immich on the other hand.

This was just one example. I did several other test. Photos works but the code behind this feels like it is some years old. Also the hardware of Synologys is usually quite poor. So it takes a long time. I also had to add more RAM as it would not work by the standard NAS you buy. (DS220+)

🏅Winner: Immich

Formats

Just wanted to do some quick notes about formats. Synology has dropped support for Heic/Hevc on server and moved this to client. It might be because they have to pay patents. There are some extensions in order to get this working like the assistant for desktop and browser. It worked for me without this but it might be basuse Windows has the store Heic extension. There is a Synology FAQ that explains this more in detail.

Immich on the other hand are using open source conversions. I do not know in detail but generating thumbs seems to be working fine. I also have the impression that the video encoder is better with Immich. There are some settings to tweak this. If you put a unsupported video file in your photos folder you will just see that the NAS CPU keeps working and you loose some space for the converted file. If you have large old formats this will be a problem. Keep them outside the photo folder.

🏅Winner: Immich

Stability & Security

If you plan to use this for your main photo storage you want it to be stable and secure. Synology is very stable. You can add more disk in a raid and use DSM to manage this. Upgrading is easy and managing it as well. When using Synologys own features like Quickconnect or the internal certificates things might seem to be easy but usually this will be more complicated then it first seems to. Or you might end up with security issues. In my case I am using Swag. And the multi factor authentication is done via Synology. Out of the box. All suspicious logins get mfa.

Immich on the other hand does not have any native mfa. And I suppose this is as expected as they want to focus on the photo features and not build other stuff. The answer is Aphelia. I must admin that I would consider myself quite technical. So when they say you can get Aphelia up and running in some minutes that does not work for me. I did get the containers up, and some configs. But the commented yaml config files is several hundreds of rows. Not sure what to change here really. And I did read the official docs. Many times. But it just did not work. So do I want to publish Immich without multifactor authentication on the internet? I have not only pictures of my kids and families here but also others. The answer is no. And even if it worked would my mfa be safe enough?

My option was to either remove Immich from Swag or just use a local dns name and change the nginx config files in sites used. I put this block here. It blocks all external access and allows only local. I will just have to wait until I find a better solution.

allow 192.168.0.0/24;
allow 172.24.0.0/23;
deny all;

If you wanted stability and security I suppose you would use Google Photos or something similar. And not be running your own containers with a beta.

🏅Winner: Synology.

Backup

Backup is important. There is not a one way solution. I will describe my setup.

• Photos taken via mobile are uploaded to NAS
• Photos taken via Camera/Drone are manually uploded to NAS
• The NAS uses Hyper Backup and backups to USB disk every night
• My old DS414 is on another site and I do I manual backup once in a while
• Immich photos are using external libraries and stored on nas

Docker containers are manually backuped. In Immich (If I would use it 100%) I would most likely use my NAS with a R/W filesystem and backup via NAS. So just have a plan. And keep some disks off-site.

🏅Winner: Draw.

Sharing

Sometimes you want to share files. Even though I am a tech person I find it very hard sometimes to share. I still use mail sometimes. My main tip that appliues both for Immich and Photos is to use a valid domain, use https and make sure you use Cloudflare or something similar for security. If sharing a http link to your dyndns domain the sender would get a certificate error or a block as your domain is unsafe.

Sharing in Immich is simple. Password, expiry date and link

Same in Photos.

However there is one more thing related to sharing that I first missed. In Synology this is called private space or shared space. I understand this may be different depending on the case but in my case I want all family users to see all images. If I enable this it works like expected.

In Immich I was a little bit confused that there was no setting for permissions of albums or photos. I would like to see something like share all photos for all users. To enable this use partner sharing. This will make you share your photos with other users. I do not find this perfect and it works way better in Photos.

🏅Winner: Synology

Maps & Geodata

In Synology Photos you were able to see maps both in the mobile app and in the browser. I think that Google maps are free for Android devices. Later they removed this in the web gui. I guess they were not willing to pay the fee to Goggle. The result is useless. I just get a lot of places like text. Another very annoying thing is that in Photo Station you were able to change the geo location. This has been removed in Photos. It has been requested now for years.

One thing that is actually good is that you can use locations to create conditional albums. It show the number of photos it applies to. In Immich you would have to use the map.

Immich on the other hand works perfect. I can browse the map and change locations. I did mount my external library as read only. In this case I was unable to set location. But I suppose this is by design.

🏅Winner: Immich

Price

Synology comes with a price. The hardware is good but expensive. There is no extra fee for most of the programs. Immich is opensource and free. You can buy a lifetime license to support. It is 99.99$. Most likely this will stay the same in the future but you never know. And you can use any hardware. Buy a used mid-range Intel NUC and it will work perfect. I know that some install Immich on a Synology NAS in docker but the NAS hardware are so poor so I do not really see the point of doing so. You will get more power for the same money if you use Immich.

Do you value your time? We have been discussing this before but if so choose something else like a cloud provider. I would also say that photos will take a little bit less of your time.

🏅Winner: Immich

Summary

So time as come so wrap up the four post. It is a draw. If I write a new post in two years I would guess the result is in favor of Immich. But will I switch now to Immich? The answer is no. Mostly because of two reasons. First conditional albums. The second one is MFA. I did not just get Authelia up and running and security is to important. I will use both but Immich will be my internal choice with external libraries used for search and machine learning.

There are other choices to like Piwego and many others. But to be honest they do not look good. It has the 2000 look and feel and they o not really do all the things that Immich can.

I would also like to put a small disclaimer here. I am no expert what so ever regarding setting this up. There are other experts who knows far more then I do. I did this mostly for myself. Make sure to read all docs and make a good understanding how it works. Also ask yourself if you want to expose things. A VPN tunnel might in some cases be a better solutions.

If I had to redo the setup today I might have considering using other reverse proxys like Caddy or Traefik. I have used Swag a long time and it works. But there might be better ways. Things changes quite rapidly. Feel free to comment or contact me.