Gallery

8 min · 9 sections

Every photo and video on the NAS in one timeline, without moving a single file from its place. The Gallery is only an index: it scans the folders you point it at, records each photo in its database and builds thumbnails. Originals are never touched — if the index were deleted, it regenerates and the photos never notice.

Indexing

Out of the box the Gallery scans the household folders whose name sounds like photos ("Photos", "Fotos", "DCIM"…); its header shows which ones it is indexing, and they can be changed. "Look for new photos" launches the scan as a background task — progress shows under Tasks — and it resumes on its own: forty thousand photos get indexed over the first night, without stealing the disk from anyone. After that, whatever you copy in appears on the next pass, or when you press the button.

Photos and videos are ordered by when they were taken, not by when they reached the NAS: the date comes from what the camera records (EXIF), and only when a photo does not carry it is the file date used. That is why a photo you copied over yesterday shows up in the summer you took it, and not at the start of the timeline.

It understands what comes out of a phone: HEIC, the cameras' RAW formats (the thumbnail and the viewer convert them on the fly), videos, and Live Photos — the photo that carries three seconds of video alongside: you see the photo, and the "Play the motion" button plays them.

Timeline and albums

• By date: everything, month by month, newest first. Each month loads as you reach it: a NAS with years of photos still opens instantly.
• Albums: your real folders — the album you already had without knowing it: the "Holidays" folder, the "2025" one, the trip one. Plus your own.
• The viewer: arrows to move along, rotate, zoom, full screen and the file's details. "Show in Files" takes you to its folder, for what the Gallery does not do (renaming, moving).
• Select several photos and download them in one go (many are prepared as a zip, as a task), put them into an album or delete them — deletion goes to the NAS recycle bin, so it can be restored from Files.

Your own albums and favourites

• "New album" creates an album of yours and puts whatever you had selected into it. An album copies nothing: the photo stays in its folder, the album only points at it. Deleting an album deletes only the album — the photos never notice, and the panel says so before you can hesitate.
• A whole album can be downloaded as a zip, built as a task and dropped into its folder, ready to download from Files.
• The heart marks a photo as a favourite, and the favourites filter shows them alone. For the house's front page, the best of the holidays or whatever is headed for print.

Trips

The Gallery knows when and where every photo was taken, so it builds on its own the albums you always mean to make and never do: every run of days with photos taken away from home is a trip, with its cover and its dates. There is nothing to set up and nothing to tag.

• “Away” is anything more than 50 km from where you take most of your photos. If you have marked private zones on the Gallery map, those win: inside them is home.
• A weekend already counts (at least two days and three photos), and a week at home between two getaways in the same month splits them into two trips.
• It is not a folder and not an album of yours: it is a stretch of dates. It does not move or copy a single file, it does not get in the way of your albums, and a photo that arrives tomorrow from somebody else's phone joins the trip it belongs to on its own.
• They are named by the month —“Trip in June 2024”— and not by the place, because the NAS does not ask any map server where you travel.

Smart search and People

Photos are called IMG_4821.HEIC, so searching by name is of little use. With smart search you type what is in the picture —“dog”, “beach”, “birthday cake”— and the Gallery brings the photos showing it. It understands Spanish, English, German, Italian, French and Portuguese. Photos matching by name or tag come first and, under “By what is in the photo”, the rest.

It is off by default. An administrator turns it on in Tools → Smart search: the NAS downloads about 530 MB once and then looks at your photos in the background, newest first, and steps aside while someone is using the Gallery. A large library takes hours; the screen says how many are done and how many are left. On a very old device or one with little memory it may not start: it says so when you turn it on and is not left half-enabled.

With it on, the “People” tab appears: the NAS groups photos by who is in them. Someone has to be in at least three photos to get an entry. For each person you can name them, say they are the same person as another (they are merged) or hide them (hidden people stay at the bottom of People, under “Hidden”, and can be shown again from there). If it got a photo wrong, select it and press “Not in these photos”. Each account only sees the people who are in the photos it can see.

Nothing leaves home. Everything is computed on the NAS, in a process with no internet connection that cannot see your files: it only receives the pixels of each photo. Turning it off stops looking at photos and frees the memory; what was already looked at is kept in case you turn it on again.

Duplicates

The "Duplicates" button looks for repeated photos among what is indexed: same size and same start of file. Each group shows its copies and how much each takes; the first of each group cannot be deleted from there — one always stays, even if you go and select everything. Deletions go to the recycle bin, as always.

Everyone sees their own

The Gallery respects what each account can open, and splits it into three tabs:

• Mine: the photos in your My Drive (its Photos folder is already made and private).
• Shared with me: what other people at home have shared with you and the shared galleries you are in.
• Household: the household photo folders you have permission for, according to who sees which folder.

Other people's photos do not show up for you, and yours do not show up for them. Not even for whoever administers, unless they switch on "See everything in every account" (Users and permissions).

Shared galleries. To gather the photos of a trip or of the kids among several people, in "Shared galleries" type the name and press "Create and invite…": the usual "Share" window opens so you can tick who you invite. Each person has to accept the invitation to get in; then you all see everyone's photos and each one uploads their own with "Upload here". Each photo still belongs to whoever uploads it — it lives inside their Photos — and only that person can delete it.

Photos from your phone

What LGM Connect copies from the phone shows up right here, in the Gallery, mixed in with everything else by date. On disk it lives in the house folder: Galeria → "Fotos del móvil" → your name → your device, and inside that one folder per year and one per month. Every photo and video keeps the date it had on the phone, so a ten-year dump ends up ordered by when each one was taken and not by the afternoon it was uploaded. The same photo is never stored twice: not when the camera roll is dumped again, not when you change phones, not when you reinstall the app.

An account that cannot write to "Galeria" keeps its camera roll in My Drive → "Fotos del móvil", which is private and only that person sees it; there it does not show up in the timeline. The app says on its screen which of the two folders applies.

Uploading from the Gallery

The Upload button drops photos into the indexed folder you choose — handy from the phone: open the panel, Gallery, Upload, and the phone's photos land on the NAS without passing through a PC.