cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47534332
I have spent a long time at Synology Photos, along with my family. We have tags and albums. Is there a good way to migrate? I’m even open to migrating manually (album by album) if I could trust the process.


I am a fan of Immich but know nothing about Synology. Does Synology have a subscription or something? Immich has done a much better job at tagging things and putting them in to albums than Apple’s Photos ever did for me, it took the stuff that Apple had tagged and than did a much better job.
about a lot of the posts aboutk Immich are s few years old. has it improved?
Their first “stable” release was 6 months ago and they are currently working on the next major version #, so yeah, focus on recent posts only or the info will be out of date.
I decided to stick with Synology. Too many moving parts and it’s writing for me right now.
What a question… :D
Anyway: YES.
I’d go as far as to say, it’s infamous state of being fragile as fuck, every update is a breaking change and needing to read every changelog before updating is a bit outdated.
But they are still working on it quite a bit.
I only really started getting deep into self hosting when the orange guy started threatening to make Canada the 51st state. So that is when I found immich, not sure how far I was into Lemmy when I found it but I have no complaints.
I’ve used it for a few years and it is an excellent application. I used Synology Photos for about a day before moving on.
Synology is not a subscription, and comes w/ Synology device. It is fine but is missing some features. Moving is a bear though so maybe I should make sure it’s really worth it.
You can set up immich to use external libraries.
It can ingest your current library without changing anything in the folder structure and it will be alongside it.
Just make sure to check the external library configuration and immichs documentation before doing anything.
Also make sure you have a backup :p That doesnt hurt either way
Moving should be fairly simple really.
Make a docker container and point Immich to the photo directory.
If I’m not mistaken, Immich copies the photos and sorts them, so you should be able to run both setups simultaneously without touching the Synology setup.
Some Synology devices aren’t capable of dealing with docker containers. Just to keep that in mind.
Just stand it up and copy over a sample set. It’ll take like two hours tops. Play around and see if you like it. I did it and had the fancy features working right out of the box.
If you’ve used Google Photos, it’s almost an exact clone.