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But what if you want to have the power
of accessing your image library anywhere, and potentially sharing it
with others, without a monthly fee or needing to worry about how private
a particular cloud service really is? The good news is that it is easier than ever to set up your own private cloud for photo sharing.
As a bonus, you’ll have the infrastructure to get remote access to other portions of your data. We’ll show you how.
A Quality NAS is the Best Place to Start
Whatever server you share from needs to be reliable and always ready. As a practical matter, NAS units are optimized for that, while consuming less power than leaving a more traditional PC server running.They also come pre-loaded with the type of software and remote access capability that makes things a lot easier. So, while you can mirror the steps we show here using an always-on PC, we’ll be using a purpose-built network server.
In this case, we’re using a Synology DS-1517+ 5-bay unit (See on Amazon), that also features 10-Gigabit connectivity for high-speed access to our photo library locally.
However, you can use just about any current model NAS from Synology, or from QNAP or Netgear, among others. We’ll be using Synology’s new Moments application, but Qfoto from QNAP, and ReadyCLOUD from Netgear offer similar functionality for users of those units.
Decide if You Want Your Cloud Server to be your Primary Photo Library
First, you’ll want to decide if your NAS (See on Amazon) is your primary storage for images, or simply a backup copy of the images on your computer.If it will be your primary image library, then you’ll want to make its storage directly accessible from your PC. If not, then you’ll want to use a sync utility, like Synology’s own Drive or an application like Allway Sync or GoodSync to keep it updated.
Plan Out Your Access and Sharing Needs
Next you have some choices about the type of sharing you want to set up. Synology offers three different ways you can get remote access to your photos.The lowest level is simply to share them as folders of files, and use its included WebDAV server to allow you to map them as a drive from a remote computer.
But that doesn’t provide any organizational or viewing extras. Photo Station, also an included package, is a robust solution to allow you not just remote access to your photos, but the ability to group them into albums, view them in a variety of ways, share them with other people or publicly, and customize how they will experience your photo gallery.
Synology markets Photo Station as being suitable for professional photographers looking to highlight their creations.
Finally, there is a new option, Moments. Moments is more of a personal tool, as it is much weaker at photo sharing with others.
But it not only has seamless integration with your mobile devices, but also built-in place, subject, and face-based tagging for quick organization.
So if what you want is a substitute for Google Photos or iCloud for your personal photos, Moments is the way to go. If you want to put a public face on your image library, or build a system where you can share with others while also allowing them to contribute, then Photo Station is the better choice.
Setting up Synology’s Photo Station
Like most NAS Packages, Photo Station is easily installed from the Package Manager, and is just as easy to turn on. It relies on Synology’s Media Indexing Service for its organizational capabilities, but has its own permission setup.You can tell it to use the same user accounts as your NAS, or let it create Photo Station-specific users. From within Photo Station you can set up Albums, give them permissions (or share them with a password), and customize the look of your online gallery.
Once you have photos in your albums, either by uploading them directly or mapping your photo folder on the NAS to a local drive on your computer and placing files there, you can view your albums by date or by geographic location.
You can also tag your images with keywords, or manually tag faces.