Disk-based photo organizer for iPad?

[Seeker4]

We are transitioning from a now-broken Windows laptop to a new iPad Air and I trying to determine how to handle our photo collection. This is my first experience using an Apple product in decades, so I may be looking in the wrong place.

My wife's workflow has been to take photos with Android phone, auto upload to Dropbox, use Downloader Pro to download to a year/month/day directory tree on a Synology NAS, auto-import into Picasa and work with photos there. I can access the NAS folder from the iPad, so I can see the photos. But what I want to do is use an organizer with ability to create albums, move files, light editing like we used to do with Picasa. I do not expect that we can recover the Picasa albums or edits, but we will have to live with that.

The photo organizers I have looked at all seem to want the photos to be in the cloud and I did not see how to get Lightroom or ACDSee, for example, to see the files on the NAS. I could not find folder synchronization on Lightroom than I see on Windows Lightroom Classic. I would prefer to keep them on a local hard drive because of cloud cost considerations. If I have to use the cloud, I'd prefer to use OneDrive to keep costs down.

I'd appreciate any suggestions.

 

[mollyc]

synology has a photo module. have you looked at it? i have no personal experience with it but it might do what you want.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

If the iPad is your only ”computer,” you may have some trouble doing some things (like getting apps to access NAS content remotely). iPads can do a lot, but there are still places where a Mac or PC will do a much better job. One option is to sign up for iCloud storage, which is really cheap, and import your content into Photos, where edits will be non-destructive, synced (and easily shareable) across Apple devices, and accessible through a web browser. You can import new photos directly to Photos, and then you can always export new content (with edits) from Photos to your NAS for backup purposes. That then “gives you an out” should you leave the Apple ecosystem. The positive with using iCloud Photo Library is that the iPad will optimize your storage if your photo library exceeds the storage of the iPad. It basically downloads reduced-size versions of your photos to save space, but will automatically download the full-res version when needed.