You’re asking great questions. Photography was the main reason I bought into Synology because other cloud providers are way too expensive once you get over 2-3 TB.

Yes exactly! And my external HDD is running into limitations too because I can't access it everywhere, and it's also about to run out. My new camera has huge files per RAW, almost 100 MBs, so my monthly photo storage is now on average about 150 GB. And it may grow. I did some napkin math, and I think I take on average 1.5-2 TB of photos per year. And it may increase next year (pre-optimizing a bit)

First I’ll say your use case does not fall into the light duty if you want to meet all your requirements. Likely you will want a 4 bay NAS with NVMe cache drives. That will most likely be the 923+ or even better the 1821+.

So, I checked out all the other NAS', both high and low end. I think my tasks are quite low end (other than wanting fast random access for editing directly on the NAS), since I don't care about transcoding videos, running containers, etc. I just want to backup my photos, access them anywhere, and share them with my friends.

You’ll want to use raid over SHR as it is more performant. RAID 5 for 4 disks. RAID 6 for more than that.

I will look into RAID 5. Dumb question, but I know that RAID 5 has redundancy, but not sure what the other 4 is.. I will Google it.

If you don’t have 10GbE networking at home don’t worry about NVMe. Hard drives can easily saturate a 1GbE network. Though if you have it, it’s really nice and NVMe storage is per cheap right now. 2 1TB sticks will work great for photos. I doubt you’ll run over using Lightroom if you’re working with a single photo set. Also keep in mind your internal network speed vs your outbound network speed. I have 10GbE at home, but if I’m somewhere else, Comcast kills me at 35mbps upload.

I honestly know very little about networking. I am a tech nerd, but my networking knowledge ends at setting up a mesh wifi network at my home. I have to check if our mesh main wifi router even has enough ethernet ports to handle another device, because I am already using one for a direct connection to my PC.

Regarding the SSD cache, I imagine even 256 to 512 GB is more than enough. My largest folder for the day is about 20 gigs.

Do you mind explaining to me how the NAS knows which files to be storage in the SSD cache over what doesn't need to it? I imagine that the current month, or the current year's photo should be stored at the SSD, but how does the NAS know this? Or do I configure it?

That said, you’re looking at probably $1200 bucks.

Yeah it definitely won't be cheap. I looked into Pcloud, and its lifetime 8 TB is $1,200 USD, which will be about the same, with significantly slower speeds and storage size.

To make it safe with a backup add another Synology with more drives. A backup should be on another device, though it doesn’t need to be fast.

I was thinking of just doing Backblaze that automatically backs up via the Synology. But I just used the pricing calculator on Backblaze and even with 5 TB, it's about $360/year. I guess I can just use my external 8 TB HDD for this in the mean time.

As far as accessing things from anywhere, that’s more a question of your home network. You can set up a VPN or tailscale and accessing your NAS as if you were at home. That can be set up regardless of what device you choose.

Is this assuming I am not using Synology Drive? I read what it does, and it seems fit for my needs, but I am not sure if this requires VPN or not.

Thank you for answering my question so in-depth and patiently. I really appreciate it. I am completely new to networking, self-hosting, and back ups. So, thank you.