Photo station both storage and album?

[spacewizard]

I recently bought a DS211J both to me and my family and to a friend of mine. I have loaded it with 2 TB disks. One of the main reasons is to organize our photo collection that is constantly growing (with two kids and a wife you can imagine ...)

I have some questions regarding this issue.
1. Should I use the "picture uploader" (I have a Swedish installation and I am not sure what it is called in English. ("Picture uploader is the client program from Synology)
2. Will this program change the pictures that I up load since this will be the only storage (with external backup of course) I don't want the original files to be changed. (or is it only the miniature pictures that are created?)
3. There is a limitation of 20 MB to the pictures is this also regarding the Videos from the cameras. Videos are usually more than 20 MB
4. Is it better to have the Videos in a separate folder (video) But then they will not be accessible through the Photo station.
5. I will also use the storage to rearrange the pictures. Rename them and in some cases rearrange them (for example tilt them or remove red eyes). Will this also apply to the miniature pictures created?

Most of all I would appreciate if anyone have experience regarding this.

BR

Dag

[grundfuttock]

Hi,
I can answer some of your questions as I've recently done just this with a DS211j. Bear in mind that I am newish to this so all I can talk about is my experience.

1)Yes. Use the picture uploader (Synology Assistant on my system). It's not 100% required but recommended. The DS211j has a poor processor for processing images. The assistant makes the "thumbnails" on your PC which has a better processor. This allows the whole operation to complete much quicker. If you don't use it and just copy images to the Photos folder the DS211j will create thumbnails but it will be a slow process.

2) The pictures I've loaded in this manner have not been changed.

3) Don't know. I've loaded large videos to the video folder. Only some small video clips were loaded to the photo folder.

4) It depends on how you plan to access the photos and videos. I want to view photos and videos and listen to music on the TV and stereo using DLNA / UPnP. I use a Sony Blu Ray player to access the files through the Synology media server. For this to work for me The files cannot really be mixed, so photos in Photo, videos in video, music in music.

From my viewpoint, the Synology Photostation is not really a media organiser. It seems targeted at external (internet) access to media for hosting blogs with a mixture of media (hence the small video clips).

5)I believe that any changes you make to the images in the photo folder (and subfolders) will result in PhotoStation regenerating the thumbnail (but I'm not 100% certain). I keep all my photos (about 17,000) in a seperate folder as a mapped drive to my PC and move the photos I want to view on the TV into subfolders within the photo folder (as albums) using the Synology Assistant. This gives me security and access to all the images for editing etc and lets me view the good images on the TV when required.

I hope this helps.

Geoff

[spacewizard]

Hi and thanks for the answers. I will use the Synology assistant (picture uploader) to do the job with the thumbnails. Good to hear that the pictures are kept without any change. I will put all video in the video folder and take backup from that one.

My plan was to access photos and videos from different devices both TV, other computers and mobile devices as i-phones/i-pad/android. I use a WD TW Live for the connection to the TV to look att videos and pictures.

My plan was then to avoid multiple places to have the photos. Only store them in one place on the NAS and then back up this on a regular basis. I see you point having them in one folder and then moving what you want to show into the photo folder. But on the other hand it would be nice to have all photos in one place. I will start with putting all the pictures in one folder on the server and map that drive and start to rename them and organize them. (this is another issue but probably doesn't fit into this forum - how to organize you pictures in folder (years?, occasions (weeding, birthday?, months? persons etc)) tagging them etc. Haven't started here yet so I have a long way to go).

Thank you for you help it made a lot of clarifications and new thoughts

BR

Dag

[grundfuttock]

I keep all photos in folders named by date.

There's a variety of software to assist with sorting them. I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to tag and organise into albums (which I then export). It's OK but there may be better software around.

[goodyear77]

Hi, just saw this post and wanted to share how I've done it

Sorting:

I place pictures in one of 2 types of folders, Misc and Event-specific. For event specific folders, I have a date prefix and a description of the event, e.g. "2011-03-11 Dads birthday". For other random/misc pictures taken in March, I'd have a folder called "2011-03 Misc" and place them all there. This gives me a folder structure like this:

2011-05-13 Moms birthday
2011-05-07 Disney world
2011-05 Misc
2011-04-13 Sea World
2011-04-07 Six flags
2011-04 Misc


Been doing this since 2002 and it works pretty well, for me at least

Keeping everything in "photo" or in multiple places:

I keep all my raw footage in one place following the structure above, this included both pictures and videos. I then select what to have in photo station, I can then edit pictures or more importantly, remove pictures that are not very nice, or if I have a series of pictures then I can select to only have the best ones in photo station.

This takes up more space, but even if you have 200 GB of pictures and videos (I have about 70 GB after 10 years of digital photography, although HD videos are starting to increase that number significantly ), I'd still prefer to have everything backed up in a place where no application touches the original files.

Just my 2 cents.

[spacewizard]

Hi thank you for you thoughts they are really helpful. I have my pictures in folder for year 2000 - 2001 - 2002 etc and then I have sub folders with date and occasion as you describe below. But the pictures are renamed with the occasion. Since some could be vacation to Spain and span over multiple dates. Now I see that with different programs (both the built in one in Windows 7, piccasa or others) are really great to use the meta data in the files and sort them in various ways instead. To ad the date in the picture then makes it unnecessary but I still think it makes sense to put the pictures in folders in order to search faster but I'm not sure.

I will create two folders one for movies and one for pictures and keep my "raw" pictures/movies in these folders and move them to photo when I want to make them more "public".

BR

Dag

[Ulfl]

I have just bought a DS211j. I copied all my pictures (a lot!) to the DS.
When I access the pics with either Photostation 5 or the app DS Photo+ for Android, then I can only see 9 of 29 albums.
After the first 9 albums it looks like the rest is trying to be read but I can only see the moving thing one sees when a file is loaded.

Have anyone had this problem and found a solution?

[hugoyles]

Hi,

I recently bought the DS211j, and this is my first experience with an NAS, so it is a pretty steep learning curve - but I'll keep this question limited to Photostation and viewing pictures on the TV (Samsung Smart TV UN46D6000).

The TV and NAS are both hooked up to a Linksys router by ethernet cable. The TV comes w/ a few built in apps (Netflix, news, google maps, etc.) And I got the NAS b/c it also seems to allow connection to external devices for movies/music/and photos.

Initially I uploaded all my pictures to the /photos folder via the File Browser. It stored fine, and I could find the pictures on the TV through the built in app, but it could not display them. This problem was fixed by uploading all the picture through the Synology Assistant uploader. Great.

The one problem I'm having is how the photos are being displayed. All but one picture are from a canon 6megapixel camera - and all of these are forced into 640x480 display. The photos themselves are 2816x2112 and 180dpi (JPG). I've tried changing the dpi and the resolution, but it is always forced into 640x480 (or 480x640 for upright). I have been able to squish a photo - into 640x360, but I've never gotten a picture wider than 640. If I zoom in it does not use the full resolution, it just blows up the 640x480.

Now the one other picture was one I took with a phone(EVO shift) camera 5MP. This is saved as 1552x2592 at 72dpi (.jpg), and is being displayed at 640x1069.

Has anyone experienced a problem similar to this? Is this a limitation of the TV? I don't have any other means of getting it to the TV(such as BP or HTMC). I'll have an AV system that is DLNA ready setup within a week that I'll try, but I just can't figure out why my images are being downscaled to 640x480!

Any thoughts/suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

[hugoyles]

Alright, after all my sleuthing, I found it!
Checked my TV, nothing. Checked photostation, and there were some resolution things, but they didn't affect how the tv saw the images.
Finally I saw a setting I was somehow missing on the DS211j>Control Panel>Media Server, there is an option of showing only low resolution pictures!