Home Server

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. ...

A perfectly sorted archive is worthless if the people it’s for can’t watch it. My two viewers are an eighty-seven-year-old and a two-year-old. Between them, they can’t manage menus, can’t type, and won’t tap through a playlist. So the watching part had to be as close to zero-effort as I could make it. The rule I designed to was simple: pick a month, then sit back. Everything after that first tap should happen on its own. ...

Here’s a problem that sounds harder than it is. New files arrive on the cutting board every hour. I sort them in passes, over several days. The automatic check keeps copying. So how does the same photo never get imported twice? No database. One small ledger, plus a cheap shortcut, do the whole job. The Ledger Does the Real Work When the hourly check copies a file onto the cutting board, it writes one line in a small record — a plain text ledger I’ve been calling R throughout this series. ...

There’s no database behind my daughter’s archive. No table of photos, no index, no metadata store. When the app needs to know what’s in “July 2026,” it opens the July 2026 folder and looks. That sounds lazy. I’d argue it’s the opposite — it’s the one decision that keeps the whole system simple enough for one person to maintain. How It’s Organized The archive is just folders on the NAS: ...

By this point in the pipeline, the boring parts are done. New files have been copied to the cutting board. I’ve picked out the ones that are my daughter. What’s left is the step that turns “a pile of selected files” into “a browsable month in her archive.” That’s one button. By now the picker has already moved my chosen files into a hand-off folder. In the app’s My Records tab, there’s a count of what’s waiting in that folder, and next to it a button that says, in effect, bring these in. I press it, and the rest happens on its own. ...

The photos were easy. The videos nearly stopped the whole project. A video of my daughter would back up to the NAS perfectly, and then, when I tried to play it in the browser, I’d get sound but no picture. Or a black rectangle. Or, for the big ones, an endless spinner while it buffered. The file was fine. It just wouldn’t play. Two separate problems were hiding here, and it took me a while to see they were separate. ...

Everything else in this pipeline runs by itself. This is the one part that needs me: looking at the day’s new files and choosing which ones are actually my daughter, worth keeping in her archive. For that I built a small browser gallery. It shows the files waiting on the cutting board, I tap the keepers, and press a button. That’s the whole job. But a few small choices made it pleasant enough to actually use every day. ...

There’s a boring step in the middle of this pipeline, and it’s the step that used to kill the whole thing. Photos land on the NAS from two phones. Before I can sort them, someone has to copy the new ones onto the working folder — the cutting board — while skipping everything already handled. That’s dull, repetitive, and easy to forget. For two years, “I’ll copy them over later” was where the process died. ...

The whole archive starts with one simple rule: every photo either of us takes should land on our home NAS by itself, with no monthly cloud fee. Two phones, one box in the house, automatic. That’s the first stage of the pipeline. It mostly “just works” — until, one day, it quietly doesn’t. This post covers both: how to set it up, and how I noticed one phone had stopped. ...

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: ...