home media server/NAS for DIY iPhotos?

[Buffalo]

I would like to look into home servers, principally to migrate our family's photos into one place and create online albums that we can link to phones. Other media like movies is a bonus but not essential as we're not big into TV.

Is plex still the go to? The only issue is I wanted to use a Linux OS and seem to recall there is an issue with plex on Linux now?

Can anyone point me to good resources?

[rednotdead]

Synology NAS have Photo Station which might do what you're after. https://www.synology.com/en-uk/dsm/feature/photo_s... They can also run plex but they have their own software for video and music too.

[barryrs]

Plex is available on MyCloudHome.

I have one and find it really simple to setup, use and share content.

[nyt]

As said above - synology is excellent and will do the job. It is expensive though

I use openmediavault - https://www.openmediavault.org - running on an old pi in an old PC case, but it'll happily rum on most old PC equipment.

It's a little fiddly to set up but there are lots of excellent youtube videos.

[Big_Dog]

I have a couple of Synology NAS boxes. The photo app works like a charm. I like the 4 drive redundancy too. 4 x 1TB drives give you 3 TB of storage with any 1 drive failure without any data loss. Thats using Synologys hybrid raid. Seems more efficient than most other raid types. I use Plex for movies but their own video and audio app works fine.

[mikeiow]

Considering the same. I do have 20 years of folders (generally by year and month, but some folders might be entire events, such as holidays, weddings etc)
They are also all on google cloud (well...most....I’m convinced GC has lost many pics!), and I do like the face recognition feature (build and edit a set to share for special birthdays), as well as search for items (maybe a bicycle or shed to refer back to).
Would Synology have those kind of capabilities?
Build “virtual” albums for events, or home improvements (for example) whilst leaving the originals in their folders?

Also would want an offside backup....yes, maybe two such devices (one could perhaps be less redundant or performant than the other)...& given we are talking hundreds of GBs, I would want to start the replication locally before driving device 2 to it’s disaster recovery location.

Need to address this soon....google will be charging from next June, & I keep putting this task off.

If it could host a website as well, that would be a bonus...we have one for a holiday cottage, but self hosting might save some cost in years ahead....

Welcome any thoughts!

Cheers

[hutchst]

I just built a Quad SATA Hat on a raspberry pi 4 (8gb) with 4x2tb 2.5" laptop drives giving about 5.5tb usable space in RAID 5. About 6 weeks so far and absolutely rock solid. Running linux (Raspbian lite) with samba shares to the network and total cost around £500. Proper metal alloy case and surprisingly small and unobtrusive.

It is running a Plex server but I'm not a big fan. Connectivity across the network is perfect, whether Windows, linux or android. I was going to spend about double on a Synology setup.

[Buffalo]

Thanks. Good to see some options. What sort of specs are required for a reasonable system?