UGREEN’s HomeAgent puts AI photo library search on hardware you own

UGREEN has moved into the smart home with HomeAgent, a range of hubs built around local AI and local storage rather than the cloud. That framing is what makes it worth a look for photographers, because underneath the smart home marketing sits a NAS with AI that can search and organise a photo library — without any of it leaving the building. Details are on UGREEN’s site.

What it actually is

Three models, and they are very different machines despite the shared naming.

The HomeAgent HA100 uses a Rockchip RK3588 with 16GB of LPDDR5, three drive bays (two for NAS storage, one dedicated to surveillance footage), an M.2 NVMe slot and 2.5Gb Ethernet. Its built-in NPU manages 6 TOPS, rising to a claimed 26 TOPS with UGREEN’s T20 accelerator card fitted.

The HA100 Pro switches to an entirely different platform, the CIX P1 CP8180, with 32GB of memory, a claimed 205 TOPS and — the specification that matters most here — 10Gb Ethernet.

Above both sits the MasterAgent MA100, built on NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor T5000 with 128GB shared with the NPU, 273GB/s of memory bandwidth, four SATA bays and HDMI 2.1 capable of 8K60.

The parts photographers should care about

Two things stand out beyond the smart home features.

The first is that the on-board AI indexes photo libraries as well as camera footage. UGREEN says it can identify people, vehicles, pets and packages, summarise events, and search stored video and photo libraries by keyword — all processed locally, with no monthly storage fee and nothing sent to a third-party server. For anyone sitting on a decade of unsorted images, an AI that indexes them on hardware you own is a genuinely appealing proposition, and a considerably more comfortable one than uploading client work to someone else’s cloud.

It can also generate highlight reels from stored libraries and display them on UGREEN’s Gallery E-Paper Smart Frame, a 13.3-inch colour E Ink panel pulling images directly from HomeAgent storage.

The second is the 10GbE on the Pro. That is the specification that turns a NAS from an archive into something you can edit 4K directly from, and it is the thing we keep flagging as missing from compact machines. If you were considering a NAS for a studio, that model at least belongs in the comparison.

The price is the problem

And it is a considerable one. The HA100 retails at $1,799, with an early bird price of $899. The HA100 Pro is $5,999, or $2,999 early bird.

For context, a capable four-bay Synology or QNAP NAS costs a fraction of that, and dedicated photo-management software will index a library perfectly well on hardware you already own. What you are paying for here is the local AI processing and the integrated camera ecosystem — and whether that is worth several thousand pounds depends entirely on whether you want the smart home half at all.

There is also a structural caveat worth knowing. Pre-orders opened on 3 September through UGREEN’s AIoT store, but the range goes to Kickstarter in October. Crowdfunding from an established company is lower risk than most, but it still means committing money to hardware that is not yet shipping.

Our honest read: the local-first principle is the right one, and the photo library indexing is genuinely interesting. But as a photography purchase this is difficult to justify at these prices, and it makes far more sense if you also want the cameras, the speaker and the smart home integration. Worth watching rather than buying — particularly to see whether the AI library search works as well in practice as it reads on paper.

UGREEN HomeAgent HA100: Specifications

Processor: Rockchip RK3588, 8 cores (4x Cortex-A76 up to 2.4GHz, 4x Cortex-A55 up to 1.8GHz).
Graphics: 4-core Mali-G610 MC4.
AI: 6 TOPS built-in NPU; 26 TOPS total with the UGREEN AI Accelerator T20 compute card.
Memory: 16GB LPDDR5, non-expandable.
System storage: 64GB eMMC.
Drive bays: three — two NAS bays plus one dedicated surveillance bay, supporting 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA 3.0 drives.
M.2: 1x 2280 NVMe, PCIe 3.0.
Networking: 1x 2.5GbE; 4x PoE camera ports (10/100Mbps, IEEE 802.3af/at).
Display: HDMI 2.0, 4K 60Hz.
Ports: 1x USB-C 5Gbps, 2x USB-A 3.0, SD 3.0 card slot, NFC.
Audio: four-microphone omnidirectional array, stereo 2x 2.5W speakers.
Smart home: Thread 1.4, Zigbee 3.0.

HA100 Pro and MasterAgent MA100

HA100 Pro: CIX P1 CP8180, 12 cores; 32GB LPDDR5; claimed 205 TOPS; 128GB NVMe system drive; 1x PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe; 10GbE; SD 4.0.
MasterAgent MA100: NVIDIA Jetson Thor T5000, 14x Neoverse-V3AE; 128GB shared with NPU; 273GB/s memory bandwidth; 256GB NVMe system drive; four SATA bays (3 NAS, 1 NVR); 2x PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe; 10GbE; 4x Gigabit PoE; HDMI 2.1 up to 8K 60Hz.

Price and availability

HomeAgent HA100: $1,799, with an early bird price of $899. HomeAgent HA100 Pro: $5,999, with an early bird price of $2,999. MasterAgent MA100 pricing has not been confirmed. Pre-orders opened on 3 September 2026 through the UGREEN AIoT Official Store, running until a Kickstarter campaign launches in October 2026. UK pricing has not been announced.