A while ago I discovered PhotoPrism and started with it on an older Synology DS916+. While it worked, the performance wasn’t quite what I hoped for, especially with AI and larger libraries.
After some searching on the local second-hand market (Willhaben), I found a great deal on a DS1621+ with 32 GB RAM and the AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU. I migrated my drives over, added two NVMe SSDs (configured as RAID-1 read/write cache), and decided to run some proper benchmarks before enabling the cache — I was curious how much difference it would actually make.
With help from AI assistants, I built automated scripts (cold starts, PowerShell orchestration, 3-run averages) to test PhotoPrism’s latest community version in four configurations:
Standard (no AI features)
Full AI (faces, classification, higher-res thumbnails)
With and without NVMe SSD read/write cache
Test datasets: 1 GB, 5 GB, and 10 GB real photo libraries (mixed JPEG,Tiff and PSD's, some videos, family photos, holidays, weddings, etc.).
The results were very interesting:
Standard mode is already quite fast on this hardware.
Full AI adds noticeable CPU load and runtime — exactly as expected.
The NVMe SSD cache made the biggest difference, cutting indexing time by 30–45 % across the board, especially on larger libraries and AI runs.
Full averaged metrics table
Bar charts for indexing time, CPU, memory, and disk throughput
Hardware and test note regarding the errors in
the log files.
Hope this helps anyone wondering how PhotoPrism performs on a Ryzen-based Synology NAS, whether AI features are worth it, or if SSD cache is a good investment.
Feedback and questions welcome!
After some searching on the local second-hand market (Willhaben), I found a great deal on a DS1621+ with 32 GB RAM and the AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU. I migrated my drives over, added two NVMe SSDs (configured as RAID-1 read/write cache), and decided to run some proper benchmarks before enabling the cache — I was curious how much difference it would actually make.
With help from AI assistants, I built automated scripts (cold starts, PowerShell orchestration, 3-run averages) to test PhotoPrism’s latest community version in four configurations:
Standard (no AI features)
Full AI (faces, classification, higher-res thumbnails)
With and without NVMe SSD read/write cache
Test datasets: 1 GB, 5 GB, and 10 GB real photo libraries (mixed JPEG,Tiff and PSD's, some videos, family photos, holidays, weddings, etc.).
The results were very interesting:
Standard mode is already quite fast on this hardware.
Full AI adds noticeable CPU load and runtime — exactly as expected.
The NVMe SSD cache made the biggest difference, cutting indexing time by 30–45 % across the board, especially on larger libraries and AI runs.
Full averaged metrics table
Bar charts for indexing time, CPU, memory, and disk throughput
Hardware and test note regarding the errors in
the log files.
Hope this helps anyone wondering how PhotoPrism performs on a Ryzen-based Synology NAS, whether AI features are worth it, or if SSD cache is a good investment.
Feedback and questions welcome!
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