Managing Media Indexes on Synology NAS

Overview

Notes related to creating and managing media indexes for photographs, videos, and music files on Synology NAS.

Creating media indexes

• DSM > Indexing Service > Media Indexing > Indexed Folder button
  • Create button
    • Name: Can be anything
    • Folder: Select the folder to index
    • File Type: Photo, Music, and/or Video depending on contents of the directory

Accessing indexed files in the Synology apps

Files won't show up in Synology media apps (e.g. Video Station, Photo Station, DS Video, DS Photo) until the directories have been indexed. This can take a long time (e.g. days) depending how many files are in the directory tree when the tree is added to media indexing.

File indexes

File indexes optimize searching media files. Primarily useful for photographs and picture files.

Make a separate entry for each location that will be searched.

Once a file index is created and saved, a magnifying glass icon will appear on the right side of the DSM task bar indicating that a file index is being updated. This icon disappears when the indexing process has completed. The indexing process will start again at night after new files are added to any of the file index locations.

Creating file indexes

• DSM > Control Panel > System > Indexing Service > File Indexing tab > Index folder list button
• Create button
  • Name: any name, but stick close to convention of naming the same name as the corresponding album in the Photo Station app
  • Folder: select top-level folder containing photos/pictures to index

See also

• Updating Media Indexes on Synology NAS