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How to Rate NAS Photos from Your iPhone Without Uploading

By Ingo D ·

Your RAW files live on a NAS in the corner of your studio. Hundreds of gigabytes, maybe terabytes. You want to review a shoot from the sofa, rate the keepers, and have those stars waiting in Lightroom when you open your Mac. The obvious move is to open Synology Photos, or the QNAP equivalent, on your iPhone. And then you hit the wall: there is no star rating. No reject flag. No way to mark a frame as a keeper. The mobile apps are built for browsing, not for culling.

So photographers do what feels natural: they copy the whole folder to a laptop, import into Lightroom, cull there, and try to sync the metadata back to the NAS later. That round-trip takes hours. It eats storage on the MacBook. And it means the iPhone - the device already in your pocket - is useless for the job.

There is another way. Connect your iPhone directly to the NAS over SMB, open the folder in a dedicated culling app, and rate every frame without copying a single file. Your photos stay on the NAS. Your ratings write to XMP sidecars that Lightroom reads automatically. No upload. No cloud. No re-import.

Why can’t I rate photos in Synology Photos on my iPhone?

Synology Photos is a capable library viewer. It indexes faces, sorts by subject, and generates thumbnails for every frame on your DiskStation. But it was never designed for rapid triage. The iOS app gives you scroll, pinch, and share. It does not give you a one-tap star rating, a reject flag, or a keep-or-discard gesture. The web interface is no better for culling: every frame loads like a file browser, and there is no keyboard-driven or gesture-driven workflow to move through a shoot at speed.

For a photographer coming home with 1,400 frames from a wedding or a portrait session, that gap is the difference between a twenty-minute cull and a two-hour copy-and-import ritual. The NAS holds your files perfectly. It serves them over the network perfectly. But without a rating layer, it is a vault with no sorting room.

The same pattern repeats on QNAP, TrueNAS, and UGREEN. The first-party mobile apps are display tools, not culling tools. None of them write XMP sidecars that your editor can read. None of them offer a full-screen, auto-advancing rating interface. The hardware is ready. The software layer that sits on top of it is not.

How do I connect my iPhone to a NAS without uploading anything?

The protocol is SMB, the same network file sharing that lets a Mac see a NAS in Finder. iOS has supported SMB natively since iOS 13 through the Files app, and third-party apps can connect directly using the SMB client built into the system. When you connect over SMB, you are browsing the actual folder tree on the NAS. Nothing is copied to iCloud. Nothing is cached in a temporary upload queue. The photo stays on the NAS drive, and the app streams a preview on demand.

CullKit uses this SMB connection to open your shoot folder directly. You see the RAW files, the JPEGs, the folder structure exactly as it sits on disk. You swipe through frames, tap a star, and the decision is written to an XMP sidecar file stored right next to the RAW on the NAS. The transfer is local network traffic only. If your iPhone is on the same Wi-Fi as the NAS, the data never leaves your building.

This is the critical distinction from a cloud photo service. A cloud app would require you to upload every frame before you can rate it. For a working photographer with terabytes of RAWs, that is neither practical nor private. SMB keeps the files where they are and lets you work on them from the device in your hand.

How do I set up SMB on a Synology NAS for iPhone access?

Every DiskStation ships with SMB enabled by default, but it is worth confirming the settings before you connect from an iPhone. The steps below use the real DSM menu names and the default photo share path.

  1. Open DSM in a browser and go to Control Panel → File Services → SMB. Confirm Enable SMB service is ticked. SMB 3 is the default on modern DSM versions and is what you want for performance and encryption.
  2. Check the shared folder that holds your photos. Synology creates a default share called photo (lower-case) during setup. If your RAWs live in a custom share such as shoots or RAW-library, note that name instead.
  3. Find your NAS address. On your local network you can use the Bonjour name diskstation.local or the IP address shown in Control Panel → Network (for example 192.168.1.15). For access outside your home, a VPN back to your network is the secure approach; QuickConnect also works but routes through Synology’s relay servers.
  4. In CullKit on your iPhone, add an SMB connection. Enter smb://diskstation.local/photo (or smb://192.168.1.15/photo) and your DSM username and password. The connection is saved securely in the iOS Keychain.
  5. Browse to your shoot folder and start a culling session. The first folder scan may take a moment if the directory is large, but subsequent opens are fast because CullKit caches the file list locally.

Nothing is copied to your iPhone. Nothing is uploaded to a third party. Your photos remain on your drives, on your network, under your control.

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

What about QNAP, TrueNAS, and UGREEN NAS devices?

The SMB workflow is identical in principle, but the share names and admin panels differ. Here are the real per-vendor paths so you do not waste time guessing.

QNAP QNAP enables SMB in Control Panel → Network & File Services → Win/Mac/NFS. The default multimedia share is called Multimedia (capital M). If you created a custom share for your RAWs, use that name instead.

  • Example SMB path: smb://192.168.1.20/Multimedia
  • Default user: the QTS admin account you created during setup. Make sure it has read/write permission on the Multimedia share (Control Panel → Shared Folders → Multimedia → Edit Permissions).

TrueNAS TrueNAS (Core or Scale) exposes SMB shares you define in Sharing → Windows Shares (SMB). A common setup is a dataset called photos shared over SMB. TrueNAS does not create a default photo share, so the name depends on what you set up.

  • Example SMB path: smb://192.168.1.25/photos
  • Credentials: a local TrueNAS user with SMB access enabled on that dataset. ACLs are managed in Storage → Pools → Dataset → Edit Permissions.

UGREEN UGREEN NASync devices run UGOS or UGOS Pro. Enable SMB in Control Panel → File Services, then check your share name under Control Panel → Shared Folders.

  • Example SMB path: smb://192.168.1.30/Photos (or whatever you named the share during setup)
  • Credentials: your UGOS admin or user account with read/write access on that share.

All three speak standard SMB 3, so the connection from CullKit works the same way once you have the correct IP and share name. The differences are in the admin panel labels and the default share names, not in the protocol itself.

How does rating work once I am connected?

CullKit is a single-purpose culling and rating app. It does not develop RAWs. It does not replace Lightroom or Capture One. It sits between your memory card and your editor, and it does one thing quickly: help you decide what to keep.

On iPhone, the session is full-screen and gesture-driven. Swipe right to keep a frame. Swipe left to reject it. Tap the star row to assign a rating from 1 to 5. A quick-access bar at the bottom switches between star ratings, a single-heart pick mode, and colour labels. Auto-advance moves you to the next frame the instant you make a decision, so you stay in rhythm. A typical wedding pass of 1,800 frames takes 25 to 40 minutes.

The session runs in three phases: start (choose all frames, unrated only, or a filtered subset), rate (the main pass), and batch review (confirm your selects before writing). That structure lets you cull in passes: a fast first sweep to drop the obvious discards, then a slower second pass to star-rate the survivors. If you only have five minutes, you can run a “reject-only” pass and come back later for the star ratings.

How do my ratings get into Lightroom or Capture One?

Every star, reject flag, and colour label you assign is written to an XMP sidecar file stored alongside your RAW files on the 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. Rejects are flagged. 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.

RAW and JPEG pairs share a single XMP sidecar, following the Lightroom convention, so nothing is duplicated. The sidecars are tiny plain-text files that travel with your library if you ever migrate to a different NAS or back up to cold storage.

This is what closes the loop. You cull on the NAS from your iPhone, and your editor inherits the result automatically.

Can I really do this without uploading my library to the cloud?

Yes. That is the entire point of the workflow. A cloud photo service would ask you to upload terabytes of RAW files before you can review them. For a photographer with a large NAS library, that is not realistic, and it defeats the purpose of owning local storage in the first place.

CullKit processes everything on your iPhone. The app streams previews over your local network. Your photos never leave your building. Your NAS credentials are stored in the iOS Keychain. There is no third-party server in the middle, no additional storage subscription, and no privacy trade-off. (Read more about the privacy model in the FAQ.)

You bought the NAS to own your data. Rating over SMB keeps that promise intact.

What if the connection drops while I am culling?

CullKit writes ratings to the NAS in real time as you go, not in a single batch at the end. If your Wi-Fi drops mid-session, the ratings you have already assigned are already saved on the NAS as XMP sidecars. When you reconnect and reopen the folder, CullKit reads those sidecars back in and resumes exactly where you left off.

For long culling sessions, keep your iPhone on a stable 5 GHz Wi-Fi network. A wired NAS with a static IP is the most reliable setup. If you are culling over QuickConnect or a VPN, be aware that remote connections can be slower and less stable than a direct local link. The ratings are safe either way, but the preview streaming will be faster on your home network.

Troubleshooting NAS connections from an iPhone

  • “Connection refused” or NAS not found. Confirm SMB is enabled in your NAS admin panel. On Synology, check Control Panel → File Services → SMB. On QNAP, check Control Panel → Network & File Services → Win/Mac/NFS. On TrueNAS, check Sharing → Windows Shares (SMB). On UGREEN, check Control Panel → File Services.
  • Credentials prompt loops. The username or password is incorrect, or the account does not have permission on that shared folder. Check the share permissions in your NAS admin panel and confirm read/write access.
  • Folder appears but is empty. The share path may be correct but the subfolder permissions may be restricted. On Synology, check Control Panel → Shared Folder → Edit → Permissions. On TrueNAS, verify dataset ACLs.
  • RAW previews load slowly. Full-resolution previews stream over the network. A 5 GHz Wi-Fi connection, or a wired Ethernet link for your NAS, makes a noticeable difference on large RAW files from 45 MP+ sensors.
  • Ratings not showing in Lightroom. Run Library → Synchronize Folder or Read Metadata from Files on the folder. Also check that Lightroom’s catalogue settings allow reading XMP metadata.
  • iPhone drops the SMB connection after a few minutes. iOS may suspend background network connections to save power. Keep CullKit in the foreground during a culling session, or disable Low Power Mode if you notice interruptions.

Start culling your NAS photos from your iPhone

CullKit runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It is available exclusively on Apple platforms; there is no Android or Windows version. You can also point it at a local folder or external SSD if you want to try the workflow before connecting your NAS. A built-in demo mode lets you explore the full culling interface on sample data without touching a real library.

Browse is free. The Pro subscription (seven-day free trial, then monthly or yearly) unlocks culling, star ratings, XMP metadata writes, move, and delete. Download CullKit from the App Store and rate your first NAS folder today.

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Synology Inc., QNAP Systems Inc., iXsystems Inc. (TrueNAS), or UGREEN Group Limited.

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