In this guide, you will learn how to create albums and upload files via various methods that suit you best, edit photos and videos, and view uploaded files with quality thumbnail for better browsing experience.
For the latest information about photo and video formats supported by Photo Station, visit Synology's website.
If you have Photo Station’s administrative privilege, you can use any of the following methods to upload a new album to the photo shared folder (for the default Photo Station managed by DSM admin) or home/photo folder (for Personal Photo Station managed by DSM users).
The length of time required largely depends on the size and the amount of files. Of all the methods mentioned in this section, we recommend you use Photo Station Uploader, which utilizes your computer’s system resources for quicker thumbnail generation and video compression before the uploading process starts.
Manage your albums with the upload, delete, download, and share functions. Edit the titles, descriptions, and access privileges according to your needs.
Up to 5,000 photos with GPS coordinates can be displayed in the Map mode.
You can browse all albums more easily in tree view on the left side of gallery. Once the tree view is enabled, you can move and copy albums displayed in the main area to any album on the left panel by the drag-and-drop method. To enable the setting, go to Settings > Photos. Tick Enable tree view of albums on the left panel to move and copy albums by dragging and dropping.
Only users belonging to the administrators group and album managers can see the tree view.
To create a full-screen slideshow using photos from an album, simply browse to this album and click Slideshow.
In slideshow mode, images are displayed in thumbnails as large as 1280px in width.
You can create categories to group related albums together. For example, you can create an album category called "Travel" to collect albums that contain photos of your different trips.
Deleting a category will not delete the original albums and files.
Go to Settings > Photos. Tick Allow users and guests to download photos and videos. Do either of the following:
If you would like to download albums and photos with Traditional Chinese titles, you need to check the codepage settings in order to have the titles displayed correctly. Log into DSM with an account belonging to the administrators group, go to Control Panel > Regional Options and make sure you have selected Traditional Chinese as the codepage.
Navigate to Albums, select the albums you want to delete or move, and click Action.
Photo Station offers various ways to share your albums, photos, and videos with other people. Read more about sharing here.
You can embed any public album into your website using HTML scripts and customize your embedding preferences.
You can refer to this tutorial for more information on embedding albums.
Smart Albums are special albums that automatically group photos or videos that match specific criteria. The contents of a Smart Album will automatically change when you change the criteria. By specifying criteria such as keywords and location tags, you can create Smart Albums that help you review and collect images efficiently.
Navigate to Smart Albums and click Add to create your own Smart Album on demand.
When entering criteria, please note the following:
Photo Station allows you to tag your photos with people, locations, and descriptions.
Simply click the photo/video to which you want to add tags. Please note that people tag is not available for videos.
Go to Settings > Photos and tick Allow users to comment on albums to let users leave their messages while viewing a photo or video.
Go to Settings > Photos and tick Enable face recognition to try out Photo Stations' face recognition feature. By enabling this function, not only can Photo Station be configured to detect faces and perform auto recognition for photos, but you can identify faces yourselves manually.
Tick Perform auto face recognition for new photos so that faces appearing in the newly-added photos will be detected and people tags will be created accordingly.
If you want to find people appearing in all photos, click the Find people for all photos button to scan all photos. Tags will be generated after the scan is finished, and name fields will be auto-filled in from your people tag list for the people you chose to tag.
If faces on the photos cannot be recognized, they will be circled in dotted lines with a question mark and no suggestions will be provided on the drop-down list. You need to identify them one by one.
Photo Station provides the search function from general to advanced for albums, photos, and videos. Please note that the search function is not available for Smart Albums.
Enter keywords in the search field in the left panel. Albums, photos, and videos matching the search criteria will appear.
Click the down arrow next to the magnifying glass in the left panel, and then specify your search criteria.
If you would like to disable the search function, go to Settings > Photos and tick Hide search function.
Photo Station provides you with an option to choose which files and albums to be displayed by excluding media files of certain formats stored in the photo shared folder from being converted. You can specify the formats by going to Settings > Photos.
Conversion settings include thumbnail creation and video conversion, allowing you to decide whether to apply the settings to newly-created albums and select for which albums you want to enable the settings. By default, the settings are enabled for all existing albums. Click Conversion Settings to disable the settings for specific albums. Alternatively, click More > Edit Album Properties while browsing to an album.
Face recognition will be disabled if album conversion is disabled.
When you set a watermark for an album, the watermark will be applied to all the pictures in the album. You can go to the album of which you wish to edit or remove the watermark, and click More > Edit Album Properties to proceed with the operation.
When you upload photos or videos for use with Media Server or Photo Station, thumbnails will be created for better browsing experience. You can set the thumbnail quality and monitor the thumbnail creation progress. Meanwhile, if you would like to view videos in the photo shared folder of Photo Station on your mobile devices, you can enable video conversion and view the conversion progress as well.
Log in to DSM, and go to Control Panel > Media Indexing to set the thumbnail quality and monitor the conversion progress. For more information about setting thumbnail quality and monitoring thumbnail creation progress, click the Help button (with a question mark) at the top-right corner.
To connect to Photo Station via mobile devices, you can download DS photo on your mobile devices to manage the photos in Photo Station.
Before downloading Photo Station photos with DS photo, go to Settings > Photos in Photo Station and enable Allow users to view and download full size photos.
For more information about operating DS photo, please refer to DS photo Help.