Hi Big Wheel, Importing “live photos” from Apple phones makes small .mov files with a few seconds of video. Those have EXIF rotation metadata that I think needs some attention. I see thumbnails in the wrong orientation, and when I play them sometimes they play correctly and sometimes they do not. If the video is upside down it does play correctly, and we just need to fix the thumbnails. However, if the video is sideways, (i.e. portrait video) it typically plays sideways on Roku, correctly on iOS devices, and in the browser it plays in the right orientation, but stretched into a landscape box. Once again the thumbnails are always sideways. I have plex server 1.32.8.7639 running in an Ubuntu 22.04 snap on x86 hardware. I have Roku, aTV, web browsers, Samsung and LG clients, iPhones and iPads. I’m also happy to help with whatever I can do to assist in diagnosis. The thread I am replying from was probably about this issue. It seemed to say that there was an intention to re-write the photos engine. Did that happen? Will that happen? I use plex for TV slideshows of my photos, and would be happy to provide input and feedback in this area if someone were interested. Thanks and regards.
I’m sorry we don’t support Apple Live Photo’s
The photos features of Plex are very much lacking. This may never get addressed.
Hi Tanschutz.
I am pretty sure it is a PLEX BUG.
I have the exact same problem, some of my home videos are suddenly upside down.
I am sure that at the time I uploaded them to the library they were displayed correctly.
But for some time now, I would say since the end of last year, certain ones are playing upside down. My preview images are also upside down, I left the ones that were generated, maybe you picked a more suitable one and thats why yours are not upside down.
Anyway, I am pretty sure that my Home Videos that are upside down now are the ones that I recorded holding the phone upside down! Phones nowadqays register that and will give that video a special orientation attribute so that the player knows that it needs to rotate the video by 180 degrees. It looks like Plex ignores this attribute in all of its players since the end of last year. Because when I use a “non-Plex” player like VLC the video is not upside down !
Do you know were to report bugs?
Hi TimTales,
I was not too happy with BigWheel’s answer. It felt like a brush-off, and that he didn’t read my post. I was not asking for Live Photos (HEIC) support, just orientation fixes on the already supported MOV to get fixed.
I really would like to see HEIC support, and its pretty lame that a media server does not support Apple media. Sheesh! Instead, I wrote my own shell script on the server to convert Apple HEIC photos to JPGs. I think I might need to write another script that searches all the short videos in the photo library for EXIF rotation data, and if it’s not set to 0 degrees, then rotate it so that it is.
Also generally, Plex has been a let down for me in the photos area.
As for Reporting Bugs, many users get per-Plexed. There is no official form or process. AFAIK, you just post something in the forum and pray that someone replies. What you see right here was my attempt to report a bug, along with a typical outcome.
Regards.
Plex support for the Photos section of Plex Server is very poor. It’s not just that there is no support for HIEC (and there have been open topics on the subject for many years), but tagging of photos generally. Who wants to be able to search photos by camera shutter speed or ISO ! Real people want to be able to look at photos by 4 key criteria. These being :- Person, Location, Album and Date taken. Plex fails on 3 of these criteria. After more than 10 years of forums on this topic, you would have expected some response from the Plex Development team if this is an area they will develop going forward.
I wish Plex would just allow “device support formats” even. For example I would be ok if only my iOS devices, Apple TV, Mac etc would support the pictures (and none Mac devices that don’t natively support heic or the web log in don’t.
Just having photos in a folder view accessible via Plex would honestly be good enough.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
