Largely based upon your content, and my desire to consolidate photos/videos/documents from numerous hard drives, I dove into my first NAS today (Amazon Prime Day). I ended up with the Synology DS923+ and two 8TB WD Red Plus HDD (16TB total). I have ~1.5TB of existing files and my network is Gigabit. Another use case is that I'd like to serve pictures of our kids from the NAS to wifi digital picture frames at grandparent's houses, which are out of state. Any tips on how to do that in DSM? I'd also like pics from our iPhone's to be backed up to the NAS automatically (instead of paying for Apple's iCloud). Is that possible or recommended with DSM? Lastly, we have a couple of dozen blu-rays and DVDs that we'd like to add to the NAS so the my son, who's a high school teacher, can access for his classroom. Is it possible to do that? Finally, I didn't buy the M.2 SSDs for this unit. Can I add them at anytime and will they help my use cases? Thanks for all that you do!
Unfortunately, most photo frames only support photo streaming from cloud services like Google Photos. It's challenging to directly access photos from a NAS on standard photo frames. However, there are some FTP protocol-based photo frames that can access photos from a NAS.
Regarding your other requirements, the DS423+ is indeed a great choice as it comes with a transcoding engine, which is particularly useful for streaming multimedia content remotely. For local streaming, this feature may not be necessary. To serve pictures to the Wi-Fi digital picture frames, you can keep your photos in the Google Photos cloud and link the frames to your Google Photos account.
To automatically back up pictures from your iPhones to the NAS, the Synology Photos app is an excellent option. It allows for seamless photo and video backups and offers convenient features for organizing your memories. Additionally, the NAS can serve as a repository for your Blu-rays and DVDs, enabling your son, who is a high school teacher, to access them for his classroom.
While you didn't purchase M.2 SSDs initially, you can add them to the DS923+ at any time. Incorporating NVMe cache can significantly enhance performance, particularly when dealing with a large collection of files. It speeds up access times and improves overall system responsiveness.