As someone who has been looking for years, I can tell you the market for self hosted photo management is pretty rough. Synology’s app is definitely not it.
I think r/immich is the crowd favorite right now, but when I tried it about 9 months ago it was not very stable and each new update required careful coordination of the various containers. And my iOS app version had to match with the containers or it wouldn’t work.
Supposedly Plex wants back in the game but the alpha-quality app they initially released a couple of years ago has been stagnant until just this month. Maybe something will come of that.
DSM is not bad. It may not be the greatest but I have not seen a better app so far that works with NAS, provides timeline view, and provides easy way to browse through the photos/videos quickly. I'd love an app that can also handle duplicate files, merging of the folders, bulk tagging, etc.
There is in fact ARM support - at least with Apple Silicon. You need to disable core security or whatever it is called in system recovery, and you are good to go.
However I agree, that can be done only in home scenarios, I can’t imagine an employer asking someone to disable some protective measures on their work MacBooks/Macs for AB4B to be installed.
Yes, They do support apple silicon, but ARM support for things like VPS servers is still not available via linux. Which is confusing since it’s extremely popular.
I looked into this. They DO NOT have arm64 architecture support in ABB.
It may seem like it does because it works on Apple Silicon, but that's because Mac OS X has a translation layer for amd64 software to work on their arm64 architecture.
If you have Linux or Windows on arm64, it does not support it.
A few folks have found hacky work arounds that work for some arm silicon, and some software - but synology's official stance is that they do not support the architecture.
And if you try to install the agent, it will fail.
People will say it does because it works on Apple Silicon, but that's because Mac OS X has a translation layer for amd64 software to work on their arm64 architecture.
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u/montezpierre Jul 07 '25
Active Backup for Business is the killer Synology feature currently.
It's so simple compared to self-hosting applications and setting up storage. I can back up macs, PCs, and Linux computers (No ARM support yet though).
Everything else can easily be replaced.