How to move photos and videos from Google Photos to Synology NAS

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How to move photos and videos from Google Photos to Synology NAS – Guide

When it comes to AI skills, Google Photos is second to none and certainly spoiled us with the endless high quality uploads it offered until recently. With Google’s announcement that your media uploads would count towards your Drive storage, many of us who own a Synology server have chosen their imaging app as a viable self-hosted option. Synology Photos received its biggest update in years, making it a breeze to set up an automatic backup to your phone’s media files. But how can you transfer your entire Google Photos library to the Synology NAS you’ve selected over the years?

It takes two steps to transfer your photos from Google Photos to a Synology DiskStation. To get started, you’ll need to download all your files from the Google Photo website, so make sure you have enough disk space on your computer. After that, let’s examine how to put these photos and videos on your network storage. It’s safe to assume that the vast majority of you have hundreds of photos and movies on Google Photos that need to be transferred to Synology NAS. In such a situation, using Google’s Takeout data export tool to download all your media files should be the simplest option.

Here it is how to go ahead:

1. Go to photos.google.com on a computer and click the gear icon in the upper right corner to enter the settings page.
2. Scroll down and expand the Export your data section and click Backup button against Backup and archive your data.
3. On the Takeout page, Google Photos should be the only option, but if you see other Google services listed as well, just uncheck everything except Google Photos and click Next Step.
4. You’ll see a list of folders marked by years, along with some custom folders that Photos created for you. Check the folders you want to move to Synology and go to the next page.
5. There, Google will let you choose the backup frequency and size of the exported zip file. Since moving photos to Synology will be unique, I selected single export and increased file size to avoid multiple downloads. You can choose between 1GB and 50GB from the dropdown menu. After that, click Create Export.
6. Depending on how much media you are exporting, you should receive the download link to your email address within minutes or hours. After receiving the email, click Download your files button and again click on Download button on the next page. This download link stays active for a week in case something goes wrong.

Moving Your Photos and Videos to a Synology NAS

Before uploading your photos to a local Synology drive, you will have to browse the downloaded folder and move some files to get it ready. But the process is quite simple and quick. Keep in mind that the steps included here apply to the latest Synology DSM 7.0, so the process may vary for earlier versions.

1. Open the .zip file you downloaded and open the Google Photos folder. There you will find all the folders you previously selected when defining up the export. These folders contain photos and videos from that year, along with .json files corresponding to each media file. These .json files carry some additional Google Photos metadata that is not useful in Synology’s equivalent Photos app.
2. To get rid of these files at once, search for .json in the Takeout folder, select them all and throw them into the trash. At this point, you can also restructure the folder directory any way you like, but you don’t necessarily need to as Synology Photos will organize the images by date by default.
3. Now open your Synology NAS in a web browser and open File Station to locate the folder that is configured up with Synology Photos package. All you need to do here is drag the Google Photos folder and drop it there. Instead of accessing it from a web browser, you can use File Explorer or Finder if you have already linked the NAS to your computer’s file manager.
4. The upload process may take a while to complete depending on the size of the folder, after which Synology Photos will begin processing your media files for indexing and its various Google Photos inspired AIs features. After all this is done, your photos and videos should populate the Synology Photos web and phone apps in the same way as in Google Photos.

Final note

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