Moving them
How to move Snapchat memories to Synology Photos with the right dates
Updated
Fix the dates first, then copy the folder onto the NAS. Synology's own documentation says that when a file has no capture date, Synology Photos uses its most recent modification time, so a raw Snapchat export lands on the day you copied it over. With the date written into each photo's EXIF, Photos files it under the day it was taken. Videos are less predictable, and they're the part worth checking.
Getting them onto the NAS
- Copy the folder in. Best for a whole library. Copy the folder of fixed photos into /home/Photos for your Personal Space, or /photo for Shared Space, using File Station or a mapped network drive. In Chrome or Edge that's the folder you picked; in Safari or Firefox, unzip the ZIP first and copy the KeepMySnaps folder inside it. Synology Photos indexes it from there.
- Or upload through Synology Photos. Synology says drag-and-drop takes at most 5,000 files per upload, and uploading a whole folder only works in Chrome and Edge. Uploads made in Timeline View are sorted into folders by date taken, which is exactly what goes wrong with an unfixed export.
- Or from a phone. Save the fixed files into your photo library and let the Synology Photos app back them up.
What Synology Photos reads
For photos, the EXIF date taken. When you edit Date taken in Synology Photos, it writes the change to the DateTime and DateTimeOriginal tags, which are the same ones this site fills in. When a file has no capture date at all, Synology says it uses the file's most recent modification time instead.
Check the videos
Synology doesn't document which field it reads a video's date from. The fixed videos carry their capture time in the MP4 header, which is where other photo apps look for it, but Synology's forums have threads about videos landing on their upload date despite correct metadata. So once indexing finishes, open a handful of videos and look at their dates.
If some are wrong, select them and edit the date and time as a batch. Synology notes that this edit isn't written back into a video file, so keep the CSV from the ZIP. It lists every memory's real capture time, and that's the record to go back to if you ever move the library.
Locations
Photos keep their GPS coordinates, and Synology Photos turns them into place names. It can't read a location from a video at all, whichever tool wrote it. And where a day's memories were too far apart, no coordinate is written in the first place rather than a guessed one.
Leave the captions folder out
If some video captions couldn't be drawn into their videos, they're saved as transparent PNGs in a captions subfolder. Synology Photos would index those as photos, so move that folder somewhere outside /home/Photos and /photo before copying the rest in.
Fix them before they go on the NAS
Dates, captions and locations back into every file, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. The first 500 files are free, so you can copy a small batch over and see how your NAS dates it before doing the rest.