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How to Cull and Rate Photos on Your UGREEN NAS

By Ingo D ·

You bought a UGREEN NASync because the hardware beats most competitors at its price: 10 GbE on the plus models, Thunderbolt 4 on the Pro, dual M.2 slots for SSD caching, and an Intel chip that handles more than just file serving. It is a fast, modern NAS that photographers notice for the wrong reason: there is no built-in way to cull a shoot on it.

You come home from a job with 1,500 frames. You need 70 keepers. The UGREEN NASync holds your RAWs perfectly. It stores them safely. It serves them over SMB to every device on your network. But the built-in UGOS photo app does not offer a star-rating workflow, does not write reject flags your editor can read, and was never built for rapid, frame-by-frame triage. So you copy the whole folder to a laptop, import into Lightroom, cull there, and hope you can get the metadata back to the NAS later. The NAS does its job as a vault. It does not do its job as a culling station.

This guide covers the dedicated culling path for UGREEN NASync owners: connecting over SMB, culling with gestures or keyboard shortcuts, and having your ratings land in Lightroom or Capture One without a re-import step. Every step uses real UGOS paths and settings, because a UGREEN NAS is not interchangeable with a Synology or a QNAP, and the setup differs where it counts.

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by UGREEN Group Limited. It connects to UGREEN NAS devices via the standard SMB protocol, the same way any other SMB client does.

What makes a UGREEN NAS different for photographers?

UGREEN entered the NAS market with the NASync series, and the hardware spec is what caught photographers’ attention. You get an Intel processor even on the entry-level DXP2800 (N100), which matters when your NAS is also running thumbnail generation or media indexing. The DXP4800 Plus and above ship with dual 10 GbE and dual 2.5 GbE ports, so your photo library loads at wired-network speed even with large RAW files. The DXP6800 Pro adds Thunderbolt 4 for direct-attached editing workflows and offers six drive bays with M.2 caching, which keeps the SMB filesystem responsive when CullKit is scanning a folder of 2,000 frames.

Photographers who pick UGREEN over the established brands usually cite three things: the price-to-spec ratio, the Intel silicon, and the fast networking out of the box. The gap is software. UGOS (and UGOS Pro on the Plus and Pro models) handles file serving and media playback competently, but its first-party photo app is a display tool, not a culling tool. That is a gap you fill with a dedicated app that connects over the same SMB protocol the NAS already speaks.

Can UGREEN’s built-in photo app cull and rate photos?

No. The photo app included with UGOS and UGOS Pro shows your library, organises by date, and lets you browse thumbnails. It does not give you a reject flag. It does not support star ratings that persist in a standard metadata format. It has no full-screen swipe-to-cull interface. It was built to display photos, not to triage them at speed.

For a working photographer, that is the difference between a tool you use and a tool you work around. A culling app needs to do four things in a tight loop: show one frame at a time, full-screen, accept a one-gesture keep-or-discard decision, auto-advance to the next frame, and write that decision to a sidecar file that your editor reads. UGOS does none of those. So the library sits on fast hardware with no fast way to sort it.

How do I connect CullKit to a UGREEN NAS over SMB?

Every UGREEN NASync model exposes your photo folders over SMB, the standard network file-sharing protocol. UGOS and UGOS Pro enable it in a few taps from the web admin panel. Here are the steps with the actual UGOS menu names:

  1. Open your UGREEN NAS web interface (UGOS or UGOS Pro, depending on your model) and sign in with your admin account.
  2. Go to Control Panel → File Services and toggle Enable SMB service on. UGOS supports SMB 2 and SMB 3; leave the maximum protocol version at SMB 3 for both performance and encryption.
  3. Confirm the shared folder that holds your photos. In UGOS, you may have created a custom share named something like Photos or RAWs during initial setup. The default shared folder structure varies by UGOS version, but you can check the path under Control Panel → Shared Folders.
  4. Find your NAS IP address. In UGOS, go to Control Panel → Network and note the IP (typically 192.168.1.x or 10.0.0.x). For consistent access, assign the NAS a static IP in your router’s DHCP reservation settings, so the address does not change when the NAS restarts.
  5. In CullKit on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, add an SMB connection. Enter the address as smb://<NAS-IP>/<share-name>, for example smb://192.168.1.30/Photos, along with your UGOS username and password.
  6. Browse to your shoot folder and start a culling session. The connection is saved securely in your device’s Keychain, so you do not need to re-enter credentials next time.

Once connected, CullKit sees your UGREEN NAS folder structure exactly as it sits on disk. Nothing is copied to a temporary location. Nothing is uploaded. Your RAWs stay on your UGREEN hardware, on your local network.

What does a culling session look like on a UGREEN library?

A culling session runs in three phases: start (all frames, unrated only, or a filtered subset by rating or colour label), rate (the main pass where you mark every frame), and batch review (a final check of your selects before the ratings are committed). You can work in passes: a fast first sweep to drop the obvious discards, then a slower second pass to assign star ratings to the survivors.

On iPhone and iPad, the interface is full-screen and gesture-driven. Swipe right to keep a frame, swipe left to reject it, or tap a star to assign a 1-to-5 rating. A quick-access bar at the bottom switches modes: five-star rating, a single-heart keep-it mode, or colour labels. The session auto-advances after each decision, so you stay in a rhythm. On Mac, the same session runs keyboard-driven: number keys for star ratings, P to pick, X to reject, 0 to clear, arrow keys to navigate. Both feel fast because there is no web UI rendering between frames and no cloud round-trip.

The real gain for a UGREEN owner is the hardware. Because UGREEN’s SMB stack runs on Intel silicon with M.2 caching, folder scans and thumbnail loads stay responsive even when you are browsing a library of 50,000 RAWs. A DXP4800 Plus over a 10 GbE wired connection loads full-resolution previews with essentially no perceptible delay. Even over Wi-Fi 6 on an iPad, the thumbnail grid populates fast enough that you can start culling within seconds of opening a folder.

How do my ratings get into Lightroom or Capture One from a UGREEN NAS?

This is the handoff that makes the whole workflow worthwhile. Every rating, reject flag, and colour label you set in CullKit is written to an XMP sidecar file stored alongside your RAW files on the UGREEN NAS. XMP is the open metadata standard that Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, and Darktable all read natively.

When you open your working folder in Lightroom after a culling session, your selects are already there. Five-star keepers are marked and pick-flagged. Rejects are flagged with an X. There is no re-import step and no manual metadata sync. If the folder is already in your Lightroom catalogue, run Library → Synchronize Folder (or Read Metadata from Files) and Lightroom pulls the new ratings in immediately. In Capture One, the same XMP sidecars are read when you import the folder into a session or catalogue.

RAW and JPEG pairs share a single XMP sidecar, following the Lightroom convention, so you are not creating duplicate metadata. The sidecars are small plain-text files that sit right next to your RAWs on the UGREEN share. You can inspect them, back them up alongside your photos, and they travel with your library if you ever migrate to a different NAS.

Which UGREEN NASync model handles a photo library well?

Every UGREEN NASync model can serve photos over SMB for culling, but the experience differs with the hardware:

  • DXP2800 (2-bay, Intel N100, dual 2.5 GbE): Handles photo browsing and culling over SMB without issue. A sensible entry point for photographers with a library under 8 to 10 TB. The 2.5 GbE link is fast enough for full-resolution previews on a single client.
  • DXP4800 Plus (4-bay, Intel Pentium Gold 8505, dual 10 GbE + dual 2.5 GbE): The sweet spot for most working photographers. Four bays give you room for a RAID-5 array with usable capacity in the 20 to 30 TB range. The 10 GbE port and M.2 caching slots make thumbnail grids and folder scans feel instant, even with large libraries.
  • DXP6800 Pro (6-bay, Intel Core i5-1235U, dual 10 GbE, Thunderbolt 4): Built for photographers who also edit directly from the NAS or want Thunderbolt-attached speed. Six bays mean headroom for a large RAW archive, and the i5 handles background tasks without slowing SMB access.
  • DXP8800 Plus (8-bay, Intel Core i5/i7, dual 10 GbE): For a studio or a team with a centralised library. CullKit connects from multiple Mac and iPad clients without contention.

All models run the same SMB stack, so the connection steps and culling workflow are identical from the DXP2800 to the DXP8800 Plus. The difference is throughput and how many users you can serve at once.

Troubleshooting UGREEN NAS connections

A few issues come up regularly with UGREEN NASync devices, and the fixes are specific to UGOS:

  • “Connection refused” or CullKit cannot find the NAS. SMB is probably disabled, or the IP address changed. In UGOS, open Control Panel → File Services and verify that SMB is toggled on. Check the NAS IP under Control Panel → Network. If it changed, assign a static IP in your router’s DHCP settings so this does not repeat.
  • Credential prompt loops. The username or password is incorrect, or the UGOS account does not have permission on that shared folder. In UGOS, go to Control Panel → Shared Folders, select the folder, and check that your user account has read and write access in the permissions tab.
  • The share appears but folders are empty or inaccessible. The shared folder’s SMB permissions may not include your user. On some UGOS versions, newly created shares default to admin-only access. Edit the share permissions to add your user.
  • RAW thumbnails load slowly over Wi-Fi. Large RAW files from 45 MP+ sensors take a moment to stream full-resolution previews over the network. Connect your culling device over 5 GHz Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6 if your network supports it) or use a wired Ethernet connection for the fastest experience. M.2 SSD caching on the UGREEN NAS also helps if you have it configured.
  • Some file formats will not open. CullKit supports most common RAW formats, HEIC, JPEG, video, and Live Photos. Very new or proprietary camera RAW files may need a CullKit update. If a file opens in Finder or Files app but not in CullKit, it is likely an unrecognised RAW variant.

Does working over SMB keep my photos private?

Yes. A cloud photo service would require you to upload your library each time you want to review it. For a photographer with terabytes of RAWs on a UGREEN NAS, that is both impractical and contrary to the reason you bought a NAS in the first place. CullKit processes everything locally on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Your photos never leave your network. Your UGOS credentials are stored in the device Keychain. There is no third-party server in the middle, no additional storage subscription, and no privacy trade-off.

You bought the UGREEN NASync to own your photos. CullKit keeps that arrangement intact. (Read more about the privacy model in the FAQ.)

Getting started

CullKit runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac (Apple platforms only; there is no Android or Windows version). If you want to try it before connecting your UGREEN NAS, point it at a local folder or external SSD, or use the built-in demo mode that runs the full culling workflow on sample data without any NAS at all.

Browse is free. The Pro subscription (seven-day free trial, then monthly or yearly) unlocks culling, star ratings, XMP metadata writes, moving files, and deleting. Download CullKit from the App Store or learn more at cullkit.com.

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by UGREEN Group Limited.

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