Depends. If it’s an online game like Splatoon, I would buy digital. If not, then I’m leaning towards physical these days.

Offline storage of Spotify music plus some local music files, bloated messaging apps, and then the majority would be photos and videos. Having cloud storage like Google One and a NAS helps, but having local files is also good when signal isn’t great.

I’m mistaken. Thanks for correcting! (Edit: looks like 256GB model is only limited to white and black, and the first color option on the Google store website is pink, which only has 128GB. Must be why I got mistaken. Thanks again!)

Not using iPhone, but it’s also partly why I’m hesitant on switching to the Pixel 9 Pro. Base P9P is 128GB with option of 256, and the regular P9 is 128GB only (Edit: it has 256 also). It’s criminal.

Every photocopy machine I’ve come across that accept USB sticks do not support exFAT, so what I would do with my USB stick is to split it into two partitions, one FAT32 and the rest exFAT.

Are there any limitations for using xpenology? I’m assuming you still won’t be able to use Synology’s services that require their servers, correct?

What’s your gripe with image search if I may ask?

I think I’m going to rely on first party apps built into Asustor or Synology if I ever want to do S3 backups.

What do you mean by “it’s a bit of lock in”? So say you have a photo with the wrong date in the EXIF file, or if you want to manually write in EXIF data to photos without it, does that mean you couldn’t?

I also use Syncthing with SyncTrayzor to sync files between my devices! Doesn’t Syncthing have the “ignore patterns” function? You can use that to ignore certain folders like your Whatsapp folder I think!

Glad Synology photos have been working great for you! Really considering it as a setup and forget solution.
Does Synology photos have content aware tagging like search for dogs, food, landscape, etc.? It’s not a must for me but would be nice to have. And if the AI face detection got someone wrong, are you able to fix it or merge the same faces? Thanks!

Thanks for the input! Do setting up multiple apps mean having to set up different photo databases/folders? Or can they share the same folders and photos?

Check out J-music Ensemble’s Persona 5 cover album Metagroove! It’s really well made, I couldn’t go back to listening the vanilla soundtrack without thinking of it.