This is the map. If you’ve followed the series, this ties the pieces together. If you’re starting here, this is the whole system in one view — how my daughter’s photos and videos get from two phones to my eighty-seven-year-old mother’s tablet, sorted by month, for nothing per month.

The Whole Pipeline

[Dad's phone]        [Mom's phone]
      |                    |
   Synology Drive auto-backup (over the internet)
      |                    |
      v                    v
        [ Home NAS: two backup folders ]     <- never edited
                    |
      hourly check copies NEW files
      (skips anything already handled)
                    v
        [ Working folder: the "cutting board" ]
                    |
      I open a browser gallery and pick the keepers
                    v
        [ One "Import" button ]
          - convert videos to H.264 720p (ffmpeg)
          - resize photos
          - file into Year / Month by the file's date
                    v
        [ Growth archive on the NAS ]
                    |
      served over a free Cloudflare tunnel
                    v
        [ Kids Player app -> "My Records" tab ]
          - tap a month
          - videos play continuously
          - photos drift by, gently zooming
                    v
        [ Grandmother's tablet. Daughter's tablet. ]

Every arrow except one is automatic. The single human step is “pick the keepers,” and it takes about a minute a day.

The One Idea That Made It Work

If you take away only one thing, make it this: never sort inside your backup.

For two years I was stuck because I kept trying to organize photos in the folder that held my only copies. It felt dangerous, so I always stopped. The fix was to copy new files onto a separate, disposable working folder — a cutting board — do all the messy sorting there, and leave the backups untouched. A small text ledger remembers what’s been handled so nothing is done twice.

That’s the keystone of the whole thing. The automation, the transcoding, the pretty month grid — all of it only became possible once I stopped guarding the backup with every click.

What It Cost

The honest numbers:

  • Monthly hosting: $0. A Synology NAS I already owned, plus a free Cloudflare tunnel. No port forwarding, no static IP, no VPS.
  • Cloud storage: $0. Every file is on a disk in my house.
  • Transcoding: $0 in fees. ffmpeg runs locally — no per-video or API charge, just some CPU time and electricity.
  • My time: about three weeks of evenings to clear two years of backlog (around 10,000 files), and about a minute a day to keep up since.

For an ongoing bill of nothing, my daughter’s entire life so far is sorted, watchable, and in the hands of the people who love her most.

Adapting It for Your Own Photos

This is personal software, so I’m not shipping a product you install. But the shape is reusable, and the good news is it’s built entirely from your own files — your family’s photos, on your own drive. Here’s the recipe:

  • A NAS or always-on machine at home to hold the files.
  • Auto-backup from your phones into per-phone folders (so you know the source).
  • A working folder separate from the backups — the cutting board. Sort only here.
  • A ledger (even a plain text file) of what you’ve handled, so duplicates and rejects don’t come back.
  • ffmpeg to convert videos to H.264 720p so they play everywhere and stream smoothly.
  • A dead-simple viewer: folders by year and month, continuous play, no menus — because the audience might be eighty-seven or two.

You don’t need my code. You need the pattern: back up safely, sort on a cutting board, keep a ledger, convert for playback, and make the watching effortless.