I’ve seen a lot of recommends for Immich on here, so I have an idea what the answer here is going to be, but I’m looking for some comparisons between it and Photoprism I’m currently using Synology Photos, and I think my biggest issue is it’s lack of metadata management. I’ve gotten around that with MetaImage and NeoFinder. I’m considering moving to something not tied to the Synology environment.
I’m sorta in the same boat as you. I run Synology all my photos and manage 5 different family members photos.
So I have different use cases for them and myself.
**For them: **They only care about the ability to see where they took their photos and its uploading correctly. The built in face detection is average at best but its enough for them to find the photo they are looking for.
They will never use the full extent of all the metadata that is available to them if I had it.
The tradeoffs are the ease of deployment and account management. I only have 5 members and if I had to teach each one which website or page to go to so they can view their images, it would drive me nuts. I simply give them credentials and a link to download from Apple Store and Playstore and off they go. New phones? No problem. Add it to their AppleTV? Don’t need to bother me.
** For Me: ** I use Excire Foto and it scans each photo and helps me manage everything with a very powerful AI tool for tagging. I use it for the majority of my photo management. The downside, its not very remote friendly. So if you’re working remote, you will not be able to manage your NAS photos from afar.
This way I keep both Synology Photos and use Excire when I’m needing to do some real work.
I think I have a very comparable workflow to yours, I have a master repository of RAW+JPEG on a NAS which I index and curate from Digikam, and I export smaller/de-exified photos into topical folders for sharing with members (generally over nextcloud).
May I ask why you export and de exify photos? Synology Photos does this work for you.
Because depending on what I’m sharing and with whom, I may not always want to send 30+ MPix images if I know it’s going to be viewed on a phone/tablet or downloaded from a data network (typically, family reunion stuff that nobody wants a 15MB ultra sharp file of). If the photos might end up on the open internet, I don’t necessarily want my camera’s serial number and other “global IDs” present in the EXIF to be kept, but I might want to share “straight out of the camera” JPEGs with full metadata with my photography enthusiasts friends. That’s one area of the workflow I feel I want to be in control, because it is very contextual.