Does anyone import photos from Synology Photo Station?

[New Daddy]

I'm trying to set up a platform through which may family members can upload the photos in their iOS devices wirelessly to a central storage, from which I can import them into Lightroom.

I've tried to do it using iCloud, Google Photos and Dropbox, but each method has shortcomings.

So now I'm thinking of using a home NAS to do it.

Has anyone imported photos from Synology Photo Station into Lightroom? Is it a smooth experience?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Interesting idea New Daddy. What kind of shortcomings did you run into?

 

[New Daddy]

Interesting idea New Daddy. What kind of shortcomings did you run into?

With iCloud, there is no automatic sync; you have to download all of the photos manually.

With Google Phtos, you may face downgrade for photos of over 16 MP.

Dropbox is expensive.

 

[LouieSherwin]

I have also stumbled around trying various methods and agree with your list of limitations. I would add that I find unnecessary and even unadvisable to use cloud storage as a transfer conduit. These "free" services, Google Photos, iCloud, etc are not really free but rather what I would call "no extra charge". There is clearly some benefit for these companies to build out billions of dollars of server farms to hold all the "family snapshots". I am not willing to blindly start uploading even more of my personal data for marginal convenience. But I digress.

For several years I have been using the PhotoSync app. It runs on each iDevice and on my Mac Pro desktop and uses the local WiFi network to communicate. You can and I have used it while traveling on the hotel WiFi or your own hotspot. Each iDevice has its own folder structure on my Mac desktop which is running the Mac version of the app all the time. Every several weeks I simply grab my wife's iPhone and iPad and run PhotoSync and tell it to sync "new" images to the Mac desktop.

Then I use Import with the "Move" and make second copy for each of the iDevice folders to bring all the images into Lightroom. Using the "Move" option automatically cleans up the PhotoSync folders so that I do not any duplicates. I also rename using the template "photographer_YYYYMMDD_NNNN" and apply creator copyright.

This only one part of the problem and that is capturing all the family images into Lightroom and getting them backed up locally and to my CrashPlan (a paid for encrypted vault). I still have to figure out reasonable way to get the edited and curated images back on to the iDevices. It also does not clean up the Camera Roll. I tend to do that only when I start running our of room in each device.

Sharing with family and friends is now an ad-hoc process of mostly shared folders in DropBox implemented using Jeffery Friedl's Collection Publisher to populate shared DropBox folders. This is not entirely acceptable since to fully share everyone in the shared group has to allocate the storage in their DropBox or share thru URLs etc.. But at least I can say here are all the Christmas pictures for every one to look at.

I keep looking at Lightroom Mobile but that only solves the problem for my iDevices. It really doesn't work any better that DropBox shared links sharing to my families devices.

I keep wondering if there is a way to use the new Mac Photos application with family sharing to accomplish this. I can easily export my curated collections out of Lightroom and import them into the Photos application on my desktop. But I think that as soon as I enable it on any iDevice it will immediately grab all the images in the camera roll and stick them into iCloud and also back into the Photos library on my Mac.

-louie