Synology Photos is a nice option to browse your photos on both the web interface and the available apps.

It comes with nice bells and whistles, like face recognition and folder & timeline views, to name a few.

However, at the time of writing this, there are only two official locations Synology Photos indexes from:

• Personal Space: /home/Photos/
• Shared Space: /photos/

What if you already have your own organization scheme, with say, custom Cloud Sync setup and you want to preserve that?

I've been in that exact position, and it turns out you can get it to work.

🚨 **This is not officially supported by Synology so it may stop working in future updates.

What didn't work

I initially tried a symlink, thinking it would work fine. That did not work, particularly no thumbnails were generated. (e.g. ln -s /volume1/home/onlyservers/custom/photofolder /volume1/photo/customfolder).

What does work

Bind mounts. A few google searches can lead to this reddit thread which was a good starting point.

• This blog post walks you through setting up a bind mount for the "Shared Space", however updating the paths to "Personal Space" equivalent paths should still work.*

Step 0: Backup

Just in case anything goes wrong, you should backup the folders in question at the very least. Double check the commands you're running as they need to be running as root and accidents happen. Make sure you understand what is going on. If not familiar, you should understand what bind mounts are.

Step 1: Decide mount point and source

You will need to figure out the absolute path to your "source" directory. That should look somewhat like /volume1/homes/onlyservers/custom/photofolder.

To find it, browse to that directory in File Station -> Right Click -> Properties: it's the Location field.

If you only have one volume, chances are that the photo directory it's the same as shown here, if you have multiple volumes or want to confirm, check the Location field in the properties of your photo share in DSM to confirm.

You will then want to create your "target" directory (e.g. /volume1/photo/customfolder) and make sure it's empty. You can, again, grab the absolute path by looking at the "Location" on the properties page.

This guide assumes:

• Source directory: /volume1/home/onlyservers/custom/photofolder
• Target directory: /volume1/photo/customfolder. Make sure to update those to whatever your directories are in all of the following commands.

Step 2: Mount

What we're doing here is setting up a bind mount from "source" to "target" directories. (similar to cp syntax).

Since you will want this to be always mounted, you can set it up to be run at start-up.

You can do so by going to Control Panel -> Task Scheduler -> Create -> Scheduled Task -> Triggered Task -> User-defined script: Then you'll want to give it a human readable name, run it as root and choose the Boot-up event:

The command to mount looks like: (remember to update paths to your own values!)

sudo mount --bind "/volume1/home/onlyservers/custom/photofolder" "/volume1/photo/customfolder"

Step 3: Re-index periodically

Unfortunately, using this method causes the automatic indexing to not be triggered, thus your new pictures won't show up unless a re-index is triggered.

Not to worry! We can just create another scheduled task to re-index.

Similar to Step 2, go to Control Panel -> Task Scheduler -> Scheduled Task -> User Defined Script:

Give this a reasonable name again, run it as root and pick your preferred schedule - how long are you willing to wait until pictures show up? (I figured once a day is fast enough for my needs).

The command to re-index is: (again, update paths as necessary)

sudo /var/packages/SynologyPhotos/target/usr/bin/synofoto-bin-index-tool -t basic -i /volume1/photo/

Step 4: Verify

Now reboot the Synology, and browse to the photo share in File Station to confirm that the mount worked and that you see the contents of your original directory.

Once you confirm everything is good, you can trigger the indexing via running the task created in step 3, or if you're patient, just wait until it gets invoked on the schedule you chose!

Note that it takes a while to index and create thumbnails. If you don't see anything in Synology Photos, give it a few hours and check back. Once indexing is done, photos do show up but without thumbnails and functionality is limited until thumbnails are produced.

When indexing is done, you should also be able to see this on the toolbar of DSM, saying it's processing images/videos (creating thumbnails) until it's done with thumbnails too:

Congrats! You should now be able to use Synology Photos AND keep your original organization scheme — once indexing and thumbnail generation completes!