Right now I'm using DS File from Synology to transfer photos to my NAS and from there there's a script [1] that organizes it into a destination folder which is then synced to Dropbox and Google Photos simultaneously. So I get to use Google Photos as my primary photo viewer but it's just essentially a cached copy of my library (which I could trash and restore at any point).
I have a series of blog posts [2] about my setup.
[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie
[2] https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
The script doesn't make many assumptions so you can get it to do pretty much anything (i.e. I wrote a plugin to have it upload a copy of every photo to Google Photos).
Here's an example of how you could get it to do what you asked if you were using Synology.
1. Use DS File's Photo Backup option to automatically sync photos from your phone to your Synology.
2. Have a scheduled task on your Synology to process photos in the synced folder to your destination folder. (I have this run every minute - it's cheap, I'm impatient, it's worked for years)
3. (optional) Configure Cloud Sync to sync the destination folder to Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. (Now you've got 2 geographically distributed copies of your archive and each supports versioning)
I'm on the fence between something diy like freenas, or more packaged like a synology. It's got to work for people on macs with small ssds who aren't interested in command lines, writing apps, or other techie level stuff. They just want to be able to find photos in a 20 year archive.
I don't know if photos will work with a library mounted on the remote drive, time machine has always been a bit touchy on the old machine over wifi. On the other hand, I'm not sure I trust the synologys if I can't pull the drives and read them elsewhere when things go wrong.
> I'm not sure I trust the synologys if I can't pull the drives and read them elsewhere when things go wrong.
Synology drives are easily mountable using mdadm + lvm.