Synology Photo Station: Disable face recognition (the right way)

Init

I activated some time ago face recognition for Photo Station on our Synology DS212+ because I thought it would be a good idea but it wasn’t. It is super slow (at least on the DS212+), unprecise, and caused over days (weeks) high CPU load so I decided to deactivated it. After deactivating the CPU load was still high and I also saw the face recognition process in the process list. After searching around I found some hints in the direction of these file(s) synophoto_face.queue, synophoto_face.queue.tmp.

Solution

The face recognition process created queue files (synophoto_face.queue and synophoto_face.queue.tmp) which caused the processing of those photo files even if face recognition is disabled. The easiest solution to stop the face recognition process is to delete those queue files. Unfortunately I didn’t found a way to do that via Web UI so you have to do that via shell and ssh.

Make sure SSH access is active (Control Panel → Terminal & SNMP). Per default only the admin user is able to login via SSH.

ssh admin@my_nas
admin@my_nas: sudo -i
root@my_nas: rm -v -- /var/services/photo/\@eaDir/synophoto_face.*

After file removing I restarted the nas, just to be sure.