Albums or Folders in a Photo Library can easily get lost as they are mixed with pictures that reside directly in the root of a library or folder.
Proposal part 1:
- Display Albums/Folders in a different section of the Photo Library, similar to how ‘On Deck’ and ‘Recently added’ show up in the home screen. This should also apply if one has a deep folder hierarchy with pictures next to subfolders.
When browsing to a Photo Library, there are Filter and Sorting options. Applying them (in particular sorting by Date Taken rather than Name) works for pictures in the library root, but NOT within Albums and Folders.
Proposal part 2:
- Add Filter, Sorting and ideally also Display (List, Icon, etc) options to Albums/Folders, regardless how deep in hierarchy a folder is.
Thanks in advance for considering this, it should help making a great product even better.
I’m not sure if i follow your request however my thought would be to have a root pictures directory, then any sub folders in that directory would be classed as an album. I don’t really see a need for this to go much deeper than 1 folder deep, sort of like how a movies directory looks. I think your proposing more of a TV shows style where there are seasons etc below.
I would also like to see the option to move pictures between albums and a multi select tool. This would physically move the file not just “link” it to a new album.
Hopefully that makes sense
Cheers
Maglor
In an extensive photo library it may make sense to have a deeper hierarchy, only considering the “leaf folders” as albums, and this doesn’t harm users who have only one level of folders in each library.
More flexible default sort options for folders and/or photo libraries are crucial though. The current default which seems to be the time at which a photo was taken, dooesn’t make sense for my photo library that contains folders with photos that are rearranged in a more logical order for display by renaming them which I do all the time when I come home with pictures taken from a trip as I select and reorder those pictures to actually tell a story, e.g., by arranging them in a logical trip through a city.
I have also never understood why you would want the “date/time taken” as the default sort option if you don’t offer any mean to chose a different order. It is not a good one if you offer no alternatives. I’ve thought about many scenarios, and about the only people it does help are those who put pictures from different cameras together in a folder, want to view them in chronological order and don’t know there exist programs that allow you to batch rename files in a folder with names starting with yyyyMMdd-hhmmss that would show files in chronological order. But then my experience with those people is that they also don’t know how to set the correct date and time in their camera which luckily is not a problem anymore with smartphones which they may be using nowadays.
However, in all other scenarios it is of no help or even makes them impossible. E.g., files from a single camera are usually numbered consecutively (unless you reset the numbering) and so the alphabetical order is also the chronological order. And if someone knows how to rename them, it is easy to start with the the time stamp in the above mentioned format. And a second scenario: If you rename files on purpose to show photos in a particular order, you have no other choice than to remove the date/time taken from the EXIF information (which with many programs means removing most of the EXIF information) and you lose all other interesting features of PLEX to order a photo library according to EXIF information.
Moreover, they try to charge for the time line feature by making it available to Plex Pass users only. So you would then expect to make it as hard as possible to view photos in a chronological order to non-pass users to make the timeline feature as useful as possible, and this does exactly the opposite…
