My wife takes a photo of our daughter at lunch. That evening, my eighty-seven-year-old mother taps 2026 → July on her tablet, and there it is.

No one uploaded anything. No one shared a link. The photo just traveled, on its own, from a phone to a grandmother’s screen. This post walks the whole path and tells you honestly how long each step takes.

The Path, Stage by Stage

Here’s the trip a single photo makes:

  1. The shot — my wife’s phone, at lunch.
  2. Auto-backup — Synology Drive on her phone copies new photos to our home NAS over Wi-Fi. This starts within minutes of getting home (or right away, on mobile data).
  3. The hourly check — once an hour, a small script copies any new files from the backup onto a working folder — the “cutting board” from the last post.
  4. Selection — I open a browser gallery and pick the ones that are actually my daughter. This is the one human step, and it takes a minute.
  5. Import — one button shrinks the videos so they stream smoothly, and files everything into the right year and month.
  6. Watching — my mother opens the app, taps the month, and the day’s photos play.

Only step 4 needs a person. Everything else runs by itself.

How Long It Really Takes

I don’t want to oversell “real time.” Here’s the honest timing:

  • Phone to NAS: minutes, once the phone is on Wi-Fi at home. Sometimes immediate on mobile data.
  • NAS to cutting board: up to one hour (the check runs hourly), or instant if I press “check now.”
  • My selection step: about a minute for a day’s worth of files.
  • Import and transcode: a short wait while videos are converted — seconds to a couple of minutes depending on how many.

So “noon to dinner” is real, but it’s not magic. The slowest automatic gap is the hourly check, and I added a manual “check now” button for the times I don’t want to wait.

Why Not Just Share an Album?

I could share a cloud album and skip most of this. I didn’t, for reasons that add up:

  • My mother can’t manage an app that logs out or asks her to update. She needs folders and a play button, nothing else.
  • The files are ours. They live on a disk in my house, not on a company’s server.
  • No monthly bill. The NAS runs at home; a free Cloudflare tunnel makes it reachable. Cloud storage for 10,000+ growing files would be a real recurring cost. This is $0.

The Cost, Plainly

  • Hosting: $0/month — home NAS plus a free Cloudflare tunnel.
  • Cloud storage: $0 — the files are on my own drive.
  • Transcoding: $0 in fees — ffmpeg runs locally, so there’s no per-video AI or API charge. It costs a little electricity and CPU time, nothing else.

The one thing this pipeline spends is my attention, once a day, for about a minute. That’s the trade I was happy to make: the machine does the boring, repeatable parts, and I do the one part that needs a human — deciding which moments are worth keeping.

The next posts open up each stage: the auto-backup from two phones, the hourly check, and the browser gallery I select with.