Just the Right Touch: How Epis Technology Makes Synology Photos’ Smart Stacking Work Better for Modern Businesses

Synology

Companies make more pictures than ever in the digital age. These include project photos, field documentation, creative assets, marketing visuals, scanned records, and internal media collections. These pictures are useful, but they quickly become too much to handle.

The “Stack Similar Photos” feature in Synology Photos helps fix this problem. But what really makes this feature powerful is the engineering behind it: an intelligent, scalable algorithm that works well with huge media libraries. We at Epis Technology set up, configure, and optimize Synology Photos in enterprise Synology environments so that businesses can get the most out of this new technology.

Let’s look at how Synology made this smart photo organization system and how Epis Technology helps businesses use it on a large scale.

The Problem: What Does “Similar” Mean for a System?

People’s ideas of “similarity” are not set in stone.
For instance:

A quick burst of birthday photos feels “similar” for the sake of organization.
But a designer might think that two landscape shots with small differences in the clouds are “unique.”
Synology needed a standard that was consistent, objective, and could be understood by machines. Epis Technology makes sure that this algorithm works perfectly in enterprise settings.

What the Algorithm Knows About Similarity

The PDQ hash algorithm used by Synology makes a “visual fingerprint” for each image. Epis Technology sets up Synology systems so that they can quickly compute, store, and compare these fingerprints, even in big business datasets.

The PDQ process has the following steps:

1. Important Visual Extraction (Changing to Grayscale)

The algorithm takes away color details and highlights structural patterns, just like an artist does when they focus on outlines. This makes sure that comparisons are based on what really matters.

2. Unified Sizing (Normalized Resolution)

All pictures, whether they come from a DSLR or a cell phone, are made to fit a certain size. Epis Technology makes small changes to this setting to find the right balance between speed and accuracy for big libraries.

3. DCT for Structural Decomposition

Synology uses the Discrete Cosine Transform to look at light and dark patterns and structural layouts. This makes a mathematical representation of how similar two images are.

4. Making a 256-bit fingerprint

Every picture gets a binary fingerprint that shows its basic structure and a “quality score” that shows how clear it is.

We make Synology environments better at Epis Technology so that these fingerprints are processed quickly, stored well, and compared easily across your NAS.

The Hamming Distance Threshold: What Does It Mean?

Synology uses Hamming Distance to compare fingerprints. This is a count of how many bits are different between two fingerprints.

Epis Technology helps companies set this threshold so that their workflows are as balanced as possible.

Rough translation:

0–15 differences = same picture or very similar copies
16–40 differences → edited, cropped, filtered, or resized versions
41–80 differences: the same scenes, but with important changes

The problem? If the limit is:

Too strict → the NAS doesn’t stack photos that are very similar to each other.
Too loose: pictures that don’t go together may be stacked.

Synology picked a “loose but safe” threshold after testing it a lot. It’s better to over-stack than under-stack, since users can easily take photos out of stacks.

The Good Side of Epis Technology

Epis Technology changes these thresholds based on:

Workflows in the industry
Use cases (field documentation vs. creative work)
Profiles of storage performance
Load for AI/photo processing

This makes sure that organizations get accurate stacking without slowing down performance.

The Engineering Problem: How to Compare Millions of Photos Quickly

Enterprise NAS systems can hold millions of pictures. If you had to compare every new upload to every existing photo, it would slow down any server. Synology stops this with multi-level optimization, and Epis Technology makes sure that these optimizations work perfectly in big environments.

1. Filtering by time window (±12 hours)

Most photos that are similar were taken around the same time. This helps Synology cut down on the range of comparisons by a lot. Epis Technology sets up indexing and scheduling to get the most out of this.

2. Offloading mobile devices (calculating PDQ on the client side)

The Synology Photos app for mobile devices uses the CPU of your phone to make PDQ fingerprints before uploading them. This lowers the load on the NAS and speeds up comparisons, which is great for businesses that do a lot of batch uploads.

Epis Technology makes sure that this feature works on all user devices in your environment.

3. Working with DSM Scheduler

Comparison of similarities works with Synology’s system-wide task scheduling, which avoids:

Waking up disks
Resource conflict
Problems with backup jobs (like Hyper Backup and ActiveProtect)
Tasks that use a lot of CPU at the same time

Epis Technology fine-tunes the schedule so that your NAS works well all the time, even when it’s busy or running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Epis Technology’s job is to bring Synology Photos Intelligence to infrastructure that is up to enterprise standards.

The “Stack Similar Photos” feature is more than just a nice-to-have; it’s a tool for making businesses more productive. It cuts down on the time it takes to sort things by hand, makes it easier to find media, and organizes large visual datasets.

Epis Technology adds to these benefits by:

Setting up and optimizing a Synology NAS
Performance tuning for places with a lot of photos
Designing storage architecture for teams that work with a lot of media
Indexing that can grow and AI-driven processing workflows
Integration with Synology ActiveProtect and backups to more than one site
A backup plan for photo libraries in a business

Epis Technology makes sure that your Synology Photos solution works perfectly, whether you work in creative teams, engineering firms, or field services.

Epis Technology powers smart automation and human control.

The “Stack Similar Photos” feature in Synology Photos combines powerful algorithms with a design that puts the user first. It does the boring tasks of grouping similar photos, looking at the structure of photos, and organizing your library, but it lets users make the final decisions.

Thanks to Epis Technology’s knowledge, businesses can:

Processing faster
Workflows for scalable comparisons
Improved storage performance
Visit Epis Technology.