There's a specific moment this article is written for: you're looking at your iCloud bill, then at the Synology NAS humming under your desk with 6 TB free, and wondering why your photos live in Apple's building instead of yours.
The math is blunt. iCloud+ is $0.99/month for 50 GB, $2.99 for 200 GB, and $9.99 for 2 TB — billed monthly, forever, with no annual discount. A typical photo library outgrows 200 GB within a few years of shooting 4K video, which puts most families on the 2 TB tier: $120 a year, $360 over three years, $1,200 over ten. Your NAS, meanwhile, was a one-time purchase and its drives cost roughly $15–20 per terabyte. The storage problem is already solved; what's missing is a reliable pipe from the iPhone to it.
Here are the two ways to build that pipe, with the trade-offs of each.
What you need
Any Synology NAS running DSM (the steps below reference DSM 7), a shared folder with enough free space, and an iPhone on the same network — or remote access if you want to back up from anywhere. Total setup time is about 15 minutes for either route.
Route 1: Synology Photos (the official app)
Synology's own Photos app for iOS is free and does automatic camera-roll backup to your NAS. If you're fully invested in the Synology ecosystem, try it first. Its trade-offs are structural rather than bugs: your photos land inside the Synology Photos library layout and are indexed by its database, remote access typically means signing into a QuickConnect account or opening ports yourself, and the app is built for exactly one destination — your Synology. If tomorrow you add an S3 bucket for off-site copies, or move to QNAP or Nextcloud, you start over with a different vendor's app. (We keep a dimension-by-dimension PhotoBridge vs Synology Photos comparison if you want the details.)
Route 2: PhotoBridge over WebDAV (vendor-neutral, no account)
PhotoBridge is our own iPhone app, so weigh this section accordingly. It backs up photos from your iPhone directly to storage you own — Synology, QNAP, Nextcloud and ownCloud over WebDAV, any S3-compatible bucket (AWS, MinIO, Aliyun OSS), or an external drive via the Files app — and the photos never pass through the developer's servers, because there aren't any. Manual backup and restore to every destination type is included at no additional purchase; credentials stay in the iOS Keychain.
Step 1 — Enable WebDAV on the Synology (5 minutes)
1. In DSM, open Package Center and install WebDAV Server. 2. Open the WebDAV Server package and enable HTTPS, which listens on port 5006 by default. (HTTP on 5005 exists, but send your photo library over TLS.) 3. In Control Panel → Shared Folder, create a folder for backups — say iphone-photos. 4. In Control Panel → User & Group, create a dedicated user (e.g. photobackup) with read/write permission on that folder only. Don't reuse your admin account: if the phone is ever compromised, the blast radius is one folder.
Step 2 — Add the NAS as a destination (2 minutes)
In PhotoBridge, add a WebDAV destination and point it at https://<your-nas-address>:5006/iphone-photos with the photobackup credentials. On your home network the address is the NAS's local IP or hostname; from outside, use whatever remote access you've already set up for the NAS (VPN back to your LAN is the cleanest option, and it means the WebDAV port never faces the internet).
Step 3 — Decide on encryption before the first upload
PhotoBridge offers optional end-to-end encryption: each file is encrypted on the iPhone before it leaves, so even the NAS administrator can't read the archive without your recovery key. You hold the key — there's no reset button, which is the entire point. Turn it on if other people administer your NAS or if the NAS itself syncs somewhere you don't control. Skip it if you want to browse the photos directly in File Station, since encrypted archives are only readable back through the app (which decrypts automatically when restoring).
Step 4 — Run the first backup
Select your photos — or the whole library — and start the upload. A first full backup of a couple hundred gigabytes is an overnight-on-Wi-Fi job; plug the phone in and let it run. After that, only new photos need to move.
What Pro adds, if you want hands-off
The free tier is fully manual: you open the app, you back up. Pro (subscription or one-time lifetime purchase, with a 7-day intro trial) adds the automation layer: background uploads that continue when you lock the phone, smart retry with exponential backoff for flaky Wi-Fi, resume for interrupted transfers, and trigger rules — back up on Wi-Fi connect, on charging, on app launch, or on a daily/weekly schedule. It also unlocks Smart Cleanup, which deletes local copies only after dual-checksum verification, with a 24-hour cooldown, auto-skip for favorites, and a full undo history — that's the feature that actually reclaims iPhone storage once the NAS holds the originals.
Backup is only half the job: test a restore
A backup you've never restored from is a hypothesis. PhotoBridge is two-way: browse what's on the NAS from the app, compare local vs. remote sync state, and restore single photos or whole folders back to the Camera Roll. Do a ten-photo test restore in week one. If your Synology-side copy also replicates off-site (Hyper Backup to a friend's NAS, or the app's own second destination pointed at an S3 bucket), you've quietly built a proper 3-2-1 setup: phone, NAS, off-site.
Should you cancel iCloud entirely?
Probably not to zero. The pragmatic endgame for most people is dropping from the 2 TB tier to the $0.99/50 GB tier: enough for device settings, messages and recent-photo sync convenience, while the full-resolution library lives on hardware you own. That single move saves $108 a year — which, over a few years, pays for the NAS drives that store the photos.
iCloud+ plan pricing per Apple's official plan list, current as of 2026.