I am not a dev. The devs will fix it when they figure out what is causing it. Among all the other bugs other users have reported and need to figure out.
Noted. But as a Plex Employee surely you have some clout and can request an update or ETA from the developers on this fix? It’s not good customer service or support to just say “I don’t have an ETA” or words to the effect of “It’s not my problem, they’ll fix it when they fix it”. Please put yourself in our shoes.
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There won’t be any ETA until they figure out what is causing it. When that happens they may know how long that takes to fix. They or I can tell you made up fake ETAs but lying won’t help anything
I do appreciate what your saying, but how long does one wait? It’s approaching 100 days since this was reported, and doing a search for “Couldn’t retrieve the play queue for this item. Please try again” in the forums shows posts that go back several years… If the problem is that difficult and can’t be fixed then say that. At least that gives us a choice then to decide if we want continue persevering with Plex or look for an alternative more reliable and stable media server.
Perhaps you could tag one of the devs who’s looking into this for more information and a possible timescale… do we even know if the problem has been acknowledged, replicated, has a solution been found and we’re just waiting for the next release?.. I’m sure I speak for a lot of users when I say ANY updates would be welcomed.
When there is an update I will happily give you one, but there isn’t
Sometime last year this same issue of being unable to directly play videos from a photos library from an iphone plexapp started happening on my build too. Same error “couldn’t retrieve the play queue for this item” w/ yellow bar at bottom. Not sure when it started, but it continues even today with the latest server updates. This functionality used to work and was promoted at one time years ago as feature improvement in Plex. prior to that improvement, I kept my videos and photos separate. After extensive work to combine and organize them all, I do not want to go back to separating them again. This seems to be a widespread issue for many people and I wonder if it works correctly for anyone at this point???
I would hope a widespread issue gets escalated with the dev team.
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Welcome to the club pal - same story for all of us here.
I wouldn’t waste your time looking for support on this, it’s been going on for so long I’ve lost any and all confidence this will ever be addressed.
I’ve heard Emby is very good, might be time to make the switch.
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If y’all can provide logs with the current version of server it would be appreciated.
@BigWheel, do you really need logs?
Surely this is easy to replicate as it seems to be an issue affecting all iOS devices?
I’ve tried multiple times on multiple iOS and tvOS devices and cannot replicate at all. Nor have our QA or dev teams. There may be something obvious that I am missing to reproduce but I cannot.
Does it matter if you are filtered in a particular way or anything?
OK I think I found a video that does this in a sub>sub folder.
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That would make sense, all my videos are in sub folders… sometimes several sub folders deep.
For example I might have:
Photos/Holidays/Thailand 2014/GoPro/01 SD Card/GOPRO001.MP4
Thank you for looking at this again and hopefully it’s an easy fix 
How do I extract the logs you need? I have 7 iOS devices and none of them will play anything. Same cont retrieve queue error. Every other client, android, appletv, web portal, fire stick, everything will play videos.
Just had a Plex App update on my iPhone yesterday but this issue was not resolved. Any update on when this fix will come?
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Don’t worry about it. I was finally able to reproduce the other day
Sorry I do not have an ETA
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I’m happy this is being looked into. Thank you. I just came across this thread because I’m having the same issue. From my computer and smart tv I’m able to watch my home movies that are in my Plex “photos” library just fine. But from my iPhone and iPad if I try to watch home movies then I receive the same message “Couldn’t retrieve the play queue for this item. Please try again.” As has been noted, I have a similar setup in that many of my home videos are also stored in the same folders as my pictures. However, I’ve also encountered this same issue even if there are just home movies within a folder that’s part of my “photos” library.
I’ve noticed that with my iPhone and iPad the issue is present when I click on my “Photos” library in the left sidebar, select library at the bottom of the screen, and “photos” is selected in the top left of the screen from the dropdown options (the 2 options I have are “photos” or “albums”). With this setup it shows me each of my folders that contain my pictures and home movies, but as has been described it will not allow me to watch any of the home videos in these folders if I select them. I just receive that “Couldn’t retrieve the play queue…” message.
***I’ve found a workaround for the time being, but I hope this can be resolved. Here’s the workaround: I select my “Photos” library from the left sidebar, but select “Albums” in the top left corner dropdown option (instead of the “Photos” option). If I go this route I can see all of my folders and within those folders I can see smaller thumbnails of the pictures and videos. If I click on the videos going this route, they will play fine from my iPad and iPhone. The downside is that with these small thumbnails there is nothing that indicates whether each file is a photo or video unless I click on it. So if you want to just quickly be able to see all your home videos within a given folder, this option doesn’t make ti easy unless you know what thumbnail you’re looking for and can recall if it’s a video or photo. Not sure if that makes sense. So this is hopefully just a temporary workaround that seems to be holding up for me more or less. However, ideally the issue can be resolved of being able to access home videos from the “Photos” option in the “Photos” library because that way you can easily tell if a file is a photo or home video (there’s a little movie icon in the bottom corner of the thumbnail along with a time indicator showing the length of the home video. So a temporary workaround exists for iPads and iPhones, but it’s still not ideal.
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Great workaround but let’s get this fixed Plex!
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Version 7.13 for iOS still has the issue in case others were wondering about recent app update.
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I have this issue also (not just on iOS devices, it also happens on my Fire Stick & I believe the XBOX app as well). I did some tinkering and the issue happens with the following setup:
1-Master Folder (Library Level) → Sub Folder Tree (Multiple Folders for different events/dates/etc) → Pictures & Videos (where I have photos & videos for a particular event, there will be 2 folders here, but if not, there will only be photos in the folder one level up from this).
2-If I select the “Photos” view, I get nice thumbnails for each of the sub folders, which is nice, i can view all the pictures fine, but if i go into a video folder, I get the “couldn’t retrieve the play queue for this item. Please try again” error message.
3-If I select the “albums” view, i just see folder “icons” (not as nice presentation), however, in this view I AM able to play those same video files, in the same folder tree structure I have setup. Not sure why it would work in one “view” but not the other, but I would think this should be a simple fix, and just apply the same logic from the “album” view to the “photos” view… as an alternative, maybe just make the “album” view show thumbnail icons like the “photos” view does…
Hope that helps somebody with at least an alternate viewing method for now until plex comes up with a more permanent fix for the “photos” view…
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Any updates to this issue? This is a frustrating amount of time to wait for what seems to be a simple, but crucial bug to be fixed.
