As you’ve probably seen if you’re reading this, we’ve launched a new Photos and Personal Videos feature: Timeline and wanted to get your thoughts on it!
The idea behind this feature is to cluster photos around the creation dates, to give you an easier way to browse and visualize your photos.
Currently the timeline feature works on Web, iOS and Android Mobile, Android TV and Apple TV.
We’re actively working on bringing the feature to every client in our ecosystem.
We know we have more work to do still with Photos and Personal Videos, but let us know what you think about timeline!
Timeline is nice. But sadly it just looks at the timestamp of the files and ignores the filename and the “Date taken” attribute of the file.
So if someone sent me now pictures of an old event, they will not appear at the proper time in the timeline.
You should take into account the filename of media (as these days, cameras, smart phones, cloud services store them like this) and/or the “Date taken” attribute if it exists.
Hi I just updated my plex server to version 1.5.5.3634 to checkout the new timeline view for photos. I am a plex pass lifetime member.
I was greeted with this message upon initial reboot of the server and clicking the “Photos” library:
Strangely enough it seems to work on iOS. This feature has been a long time coming. It’s nice to open my photo library and see relevant photos instead of year old photos. No longer will I search for an hour for my most recently backed up photos!
My server is only showing videos from 1999 to 2014, anything outside is not shown.
Also the server is not showing any picture.
Is there an indexing process that needs to finish?
If you’re looking at the Web interface for Photos, go to the upper right, and click on the icon w/ 4 squares, and change to ‘Browse by Type’ and see if you see any photos there? This is a filesystem view, and should be the same items as Timeline, just in a different view. If it is the same, try to rescan, if that doesn’t work, there might be a permission issue or something else preventing Plex from seeing those photos.
I also get the unexpected error loading this library on IE, Edge and chrome.
UPDATE: magically its now working in all browsers. I suspect the Server have to be rebooted (the installer should notify if this was the case)
The timeline feature only seems to go back to January 1, 1970:
This is NOT useful - I have plenty of photos taken earlier than this, and also have scans of old photos with the date taken metadata attribute set to the correct year, and my earliest is a wedding photo taken in 1866:
@avelos156 said:
Timeline is nice. But sadly it just looks at the timestamp of the files and ignores the filename and the “Date taken” attribute of the file.
So if someone sent me now pictures of an old event, they will not appear at the proper time in the timeline.
Well, it seems to be using the “date taken” attribute in my photos, but the timeline only goes back to 1970, which is not very much use to me…
@avelos156 said:
Timeline is nice. But sadly it just looks at the timestamp of the files and ignores the filename and the “Date taken” attribute of the file.
So if someone sent me now pictures of an old event, they will not appear at the proper time in the timeline.
Well, it seems to be using the “date taken” attribute in my photos, but the timeline only goes back to 1970, which is not very much use to me…
For me not always working with “date taken”. can’t understand why exactly. Also I have tons of pictures sent to me by others, and in lots of cases this attribute is missing from the photos. I tried to add myself the “date taken” in some photos, but it still ignores it. In this case the only cure is the filename. At least PMS should offer some kind of criteria so as to allow users select how their timeline is built.
The Timeline view is also not showing all my newer photos. There comes a point where only videos are being included, all the photos are missing. After the first rescan of my photo library, there were no photos newer than May 2007 being shown, only videos. After a further rescan, I 've now got photos up to January 2009 included. I’ll do a further rescan and see what happens.
Edit: after yet another rescan, it’s showing photos up to July 2010, but nothing newer…
Clearly, the Timeline feature is still very problematic…
I have tons of photos missing too (with some very old ones showing up), but videos are showing in the timeline. After some library re-scans and refreshes of the page, I have a few of the most recent photos in the timeline now - perhaps 10 or so. The older photos are all in Plex, as they show up in Recently Added, for example.
Those of us that are software developers recognize Jan 1, 1970 as the dawn of Unix time. Most of the time, date/time is stored as the number of seconds or milliseconds that have elapsed since Jan 1, 1970; making those methods incapable of representing a date before then. Hopefully the Plex gurus have something else they can easily switch to.
Oh, and as an aside, if you were worried about computers and Y2K, then just wait for January 19, 2038 03:14:07 GMT when software that uses 32-bit Unix time will hit the limit of what they can represent.
@rwhapham said:
Those of us that are software developers recognize Jan 1, 1970 as the dawn of Unix time. Most of the time, date/time is stored as the number of seconds or milliseconds that have elapsed since Jan 1, 1970; making those methods incapable of representing a date before then.
Yes, I thought it looked familiar. I had hoped that Plex developers would have done better than this.
