lumentoLOAD
LOAD has one job: get every photo and video off your iPhone and onto your own NAS, byte for byte, without fighting SMB or AirDrop, and then tell you, with a number you can check, which ones are verified and on your NAS. Thousands at once, or each night while it charges.
“1,204 of 1,204 assets verified and on your NAS.”
LOAD never says “uploaded” or “sync complete”. It says “verified”, and it means the bytes on your NAS were checked against the bytes that left your phone. Everything on this page exists to make that sentence true.
27 GB in 37 minutes.
With the phone locked.
You can use LOAD two ways, and it's fast both ways.
Lock it and walk away
Tap Load, plug the phone in and lock it. Uploads run through iOS's own background upload service, so they keep going with the screen locked and even after the app has been closed. In our test, a locked phone loaded 26.9 GB, 1,228 photos and videos, in 37 minutes, with zero failures. Every file was hash-checked on the NAS.
With the app open
Faster still. LOAD adjusts how many files it sends at once to suit your phone's temperature and battery. With LOAD open, the same 27 GB loaded in under 10 minutes, and large videos went across at up to 78 MB a second.
Your results may vary. These are our numbers, on an iPhone 16, two Wi-Fi 6 routers and an Asustor NAS. We also ran LOAD on an iPhone XR, 12, 14 and 15 Pro, and they looked nearly as fast, though we didn't time them. The older the phone, the slower the run. Your speed depends on your Wi-Fi, your router, your NAS and your phone. When the phone is locked, iOS decides how much time LOAD gets, so a locked Load takes longer than one with the app open.
For the fastest run, keep LOAD open. If you lock the phone, plug it in.
Built for the only copy of your photos.
Overnight, while it charges
Turn on "Back up new photos while charging" and LOAD sends what's new since your last Load while the phone charges overnight: new photos, and photos you've edited since. It covers what you loaded last, your whole library or one album. Anything that didn't make it is tried again the next night, and the switch shows when new photos last reached the NAS. iOS picks the exact time, so LOAD can't promise one.
Named by when you took it
On the NAS, each file is named by the moment it was taken, like 2026.10.19 20.42.21.000.HEIC, in a folder for its month, so your archive sorts itself. A video is dated from its own clock and time zone. The name your iPhone gave it stays in the import report.
Hashed at both ends
Every file gets a SHA-256 fingerprint on the phone and another on the NAS, from the bytes that actually arrived. If they don't match, the file is never stored.
Resumes where it stopped
Large files go in 8 MB chunks, each with its own hash. If the connection drops 95% of the way through a 4 GB video, LOAD carries on from the last confirmed chunk instead of starting again.
Checks for duplicates first
LOAD asks the NAS what it already has before sending any bytes. Photos that are already in the archive are skipped, even ones another device loaded. Run a second Load straight after the first and nothing is sent again: in our test, 1,224 photos and videos settled in 9 seconds.
Never re-encoded
The files in your archive are the same bytes your camera wrote, so the date, place, camera and lens details inside each one come with it. Edited photos come across together with their originals.
A Live Photo stays whole
A Live Photo is a still image plus a short video. It only counts as archived once both parts are verified. RAW+JPEG pairs, edited photos and edited Live Photos work the same way: every part arrives, and nothing counts until every part is verified.
Survives interruptions
A Load picks up where it left off after the app is closed, iOS suspends it, or the Wi-Fi drops. Failed uploads are retried after about 5, 15, 45, 135 and 300 seconds, and after that LOAD keeps trying, more slowly, for up to 48 hours. If your NAS goes away for a few minutes, LOAD waits for it instead of using up every file's retries.
Won't fill your phone
LOAD pauses before it runs your phone out of storage, and sends the smallest files first so progress keeps coming. If a Load won't fit, it warns you before starting. If your NAS fills up, LOAD says so, keeps everything already verified, and carries on by itself once there's room.
Your phone, your call
LOAD shows you what's verified on your NAS. It never removes anything from your phone by itself. What stays on your phone is up to you, and if you ask LOAD to remove photos, it checks each one against the NAS again first, asks you batch by batch, and tells you why it held any back.
Every frame of a burst
A burst of twenty is twenty photos, not one. LOAD doesn't pick favourites. Load your whole library, or just one of your own albums.
Pick the folder
Send a Load to your default folder, or to one your NAS admin set up, such as a folder for each child. LOAD remembers your last choice.
Hidden stays hidden
If you hid a photo on your iPhone, LOAD never sees it, never reads it and never loads it.
Made for photos on the phone
LOAD is fastest when your photos are stored on the iPhone itself. With iCloud Photos on, it works too: it tells you before a Load when some originals have to come down from iCloud first. LOAD needs access to your whole photo library, and says so if you've only allowed some photos.
Works with any NAS.
No install needed.
Generic mode is for you if you'd rather not install lumento STORE, or your NAS can't run it: for now STORE runs only on Asustor. It lets LOAD write straight to any NAS that can serve WebDAV over HTTPS, including Asustor, Synology and QNAP. On most of them that's a setting you turn on, not an app you install.
Generic mode is designed and being built. LOAD won't be released without it. It's described here as it's intended to work.
How it works
Why WebDAV and not SMB. WebDAV runs over HTTP, so LOAD can hand each upload to iOS's background upload service, the same one Verified mode uses. An SMB connection runs on raw sockets inside the app, and it stops as soon as iOS suspends the app. SMB isn't slower on a LAN. WebDAV was chosen because it's the one that keeps going when the phone is locked.
Writing a file. Each file is uploaded under a temporary .part name and then moved to its final name in one step. A half-finished upload never appears under a real filename.
PUT _lumento/2026.09/.2026.09.14 18.03.52.120.HEIC.{device}.{id}.part
MOVE → _lumento/2026.09/2026.09.14 18.03.52.120.HEIC (Overwrite: F)Same layout as Verified mode. LOAD names and files each photo by the same rules STORE uses: {root}/_lumento/{YYYY.MM}/, named by when it was taken. Your archive looks the same whichever mode filled it.
Checked after it lands. LOAD fingerprints every file in small blocks as it sends it. Once the file is in place, it asks the NAS for its size and reads back a few blocks at random to compare, and does it again with fresh blocks before it would ever offer to remove a photo from your phone.
Duplicate checking moves to the phone. LOAD keeps a local list of every file it's sent, with its hash, and a copy of that list on the NAS itself, so a reinstalled app still knows what it sent. If you load photos it already copied, it asks before sending them again.
Whole files only. WebDAV has no standard way to put chunks back together, so a dropped upload restarts that one file from the beginning.
| Generic (WebDAV) | Verified (with STORE) | |
|---|---|---|
| Needs a NAS install | No, just a WebDAV setting | Yes, one App Central package |
| Folder layout, filenames, dates | Identical | Identical |
| Uploads keep going when locked | Yes | Yes |
| Live Photos kept whole | Yes | Yes |
| Resume inside a large file | No, the file restarts | Yes, from the last chunk |
| Confirms the file arrived | Yes | Yes |
| Confirms it arrived byte for byte | Spot checks: size and random blocks read back | Yes, every byte |
| Duplicate detection | On the phone only | On the NAS, across every device |
| Survives an app reinstall | Yes, from its list on the NAS | Yes, the NAS remembers |
| Knows what a new phone already sent | No | Yes, the NAS checks by fingerprint |
Generic mode tells you what it can't check. It'll say that files arrived and passed its spot checks, but not that every byte was checked, because nothing on the NAS can do that.
Try it before you have a NAS. LOAD also ships with a demo mode, so you can walk through every screen on your own iPhone with no NAS at all.
Your phone, your NAS.
Nothing in between.
LOAD finds lumento STORE on your home network, pairs with it, and sends your photos there and nowhere else. Pairing is started from the NAS with a six-digit code that never crosses the network, works only on your local network, and fixes the NAS's certificate so the phone only ever talks to that NAS. "Forget This Server" on the phone removes the phone from the NAS too.
There are no accounts, no analytics and no tracking. See the privacy policy.
