A QNAP NAS can be a good professional and domestic alternative to the Google Photos service- We will tell you what our own can offer us by not depending on Google services.
If we are users who in our professional or personal projects handle high-quality photos or high-definition videos, having safe files is one of our priorities. A QNAP NAS like SMB QNAP TS-253D it can easily be the solution to our space and security problems without losing what the Google ecosystem offers us.
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Limitations of Google Photos
Google Photos is a free service that is offered to us by default when we create our Google account for personal email or our YouTube channel. But it comes with a 15GB capacity limit that will quickly fill up with photos and videos. It offers us the option to delete them to make more space, which costs us time to organize and assess the files that have to be deleted.
It is true that it does not offer the ability to compress photos and videos to make space. But if it is important or essential that the photos and videos are of high quality and are not compressed, we can deactivate that option, but that space will fill up quickly. An uncompressed photo of a mid-range mobile can easily reach 500KB, and more if we already use a professional camera or the most advanced options of modern mobiles.
It is true that Google has payment options to expand our capacity from 100 GB to 2 TB through Google One. But they will always be on Google servers, which can receive hacker attacks and compromise our work or privacy. They can also be removed if the servers on which our photos and videos are hosted suffer from a physical problem beyond our control.
Nor should we discount the fact that Google has been using the photos we upload for years to improve its photo classification algorithm. It is included in the terms of service and we cannot ignore this decision and it is a price we pay for the free service. Not having photos exposed to Google's algorithms is one more layer of security for us and the people who appear in them.
The advantages of having your own NAS to save your most important photos and videos
Having our own NAS server at home, office or study for various reasons that we will end up evaluating over time ends up being the best option. It is one of those elements that over time we will get more out of it and uses.
With a QNAP NAS we can have all our photos and videos safely stored, with backup (RAID). Those important travel memories or photos of our work will not be lost by an attack or a server crash as they are less likely to go for a separate server.
They will also not be exposed if our Google account is compromised in a cyberattack. It is an independent server and quite small, so it will not be a target for cyberattacks. Not having a part of our work so exposed in such a widely used service is an important additional layer of security, especially if our projects depend on it.
There is also the factor of not having to compromise the quality of the photos and videos to face the capacity limit that Google One offers us. Its maximum is 2 TB for € 99 per year, but it is a capacity that we can easily exceed if we are professional photographers or video editors and we use that space to store important assets. If we need to expand space beyond the initial, we can buy physical capacity expansions.
And if we are very concerned about security, we can physically disconnect the memory storages from the QNAP NAS and only have them connected for as long as necessary. This is not possible with the Google Photos service as we do not have the physical servers at our disposal to physically control what files are available online. And it is that being able to have the data stored in a QNAP NAS and fully control access to our data it is a great safety factor.
How to transfer photos to a QNAP NAS using QFile
Transferring the photos from our mobile or Android device to a NAP NAS using QFile is quite simple, since its interface drinks a lot from that of Google Photos. Its use is simple and with the configuration of automatically uploading the photos from our camera or mobile, we will not have to invest any time in uploading them manually.
For all the photos we take with our mobile device to go to our QNAP NAS server using QFile we will have to add our NAS and use our password so that the app has access to it. Once the access is saved and admitted, we can configure so that all the photos on our device are saved on the NAS. In the app menu, we go to the configuration option and activate the automatic loading option.
We can configure the automatic upload so that only the photos are uploaded from the camera album so that the images that arrive from messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram are not uploaded, or apps that generate their own photos such as Pokémon Go. Other options that we can configure is that they be uploaded to a specific folder on the NAS, if we want the original file name to be kept, and if we want the app to only be able to upload photos to our QNAP NAS through QFile if we are connected via Wi-Fi. -Fi.
We can deactivate the option to upload only via Wi-Fi so that the app copies the photos whenever there is a connection, but we will be using our mobile data rate. If we do not have a comprehensive data plan, we will end up using a large part of our gigabytes, which is an option that must be watched.
If we want to share photos with friends, family or any other contact, it is possible to do so with the QuMagie app. Its environment is very similar to the Google Photos app, so we will not have to learn from scratch the options to share or edit our photos on our QNAP NAS from the mobile device.
