I was looking at photos last night, and finally got myself to come here to report this issue/ask for suggestions. Looks like it’s a known Plex problem.
For me, I have all of my photos on a high-end QNAP NAS shared via gigabit hardwired Ethernet. Changing through photos on either PHT on Intel NUC or Xbox One Plex client is painfully slow - 4-5 seconds between each. Made it impossible to quickly flip through, show friends pictures from Italy, etc.
Leads to two questions for this thread:
Is there any way to get Plex to not transcode/generate thumbnails on fly/or otherwise speed up display using current versions?
What have people found to be the best non-Plex client to show photos in a fast/non-transcoded/highest quality manner on a TV/projector? (Not PC, which doesn’t help in this situation).
Hope this gets addressed, I’m about to yank Photos from Plex for the second time - disappointed.
Avrignaud, the best non-Plex client using an Apple TV that I have used is “FileBrowserTV”. The product shows pictures instantly and even has a slideshow option for Ken Burns effect if you like that. Nothing beats this for showing pictures on a big screen.
I pulled my photos from PLEX because it cast a negative image on the product.
I would like to bump this topic. It seems ever since Plex introduced photos it was unusable. How can this be? It would be great to get an official statement from Plex as to why such a great product has such a poor, unusable feature. Similar foto apps display photos instantly, plex streams videos instantly how come a 3MB Photo takes over 10 seconds to load?!
Bump bump bump! This really needs to be addressed. The photos library’s performance is pretty bad. On the Android app, every second photo takes upwards of 5 seconds to load. On the Roku app, it can take easily take 5 to 10 seconds to load. Makes it VERY difficult to flip through photos.
I want to echo my support for Plex fixing this problem about the horrendous Plex photos performance. I am going to yank Photos as well. Not to mention that there STILL is no slideshow available. I just understand why Plex support is so unresponsive. I understand there are development priorities but these problems are major.
I have exactly the same issue with PMS running on a DS216j. I intended to upgrade the nas to a 718+ or 918+ or a NUC but if even a beefy Xeon can’t do it faster, why bother? The main reason I bought a plex pass is being able to watch our photo’s on any device, including out of our home…
I know the DS216j isn’t a powerhouse, but as it looks, the cpu and ram spec don’t seem to change much as people with much more powerful servers have the same issue?
I would love this to be solved as it is the main reason I bought a Plex pass…
Same issue here, running off Drobo b810n and Photos are unusable to slow to get anything up so I have bothered utilizing the feature yet. Hoping they get something worked out
This topic has been open for almost two years now. Yet nothing has changed. Photos in Plex is unusable like this and I still don’t get why Plex doesn’t do it like every other photo managing software / Library: During import, generate down-sized versions of the photos and depending on the client distribute one of these down-sized versions… Can’t be that hard to implement this!
Come on lets generate previews ahead of time and speed things up! I’m a web developer and I could make a faster photo gallery in a few hours it would not take much work plex!
Personally, I’ve been a bit annoyed that during picture slideshows, I get to see the loading circle each end every time the photo changes.
Maybe a easy solution would be to implement a predictive caching mechanism: since during slideshows plex can browse in 1 path only, as in from pic122->pic123->pic124…etc, plex can pre-load and generate the correct photo format for the next 1 or 2 forward steps, in the background, and store them locally in a cache.
When the user then presses ‘next’ and the next photo comes, it is read from the local cache, hopefully much faster. Some people are now happy
I’m having this issue also, Photo browsing is unusable… it takes around 5 seconds to load a 3 MB picture. Already canceled my Plex Pass because of this. I don’t understand how a 2 year old issue and nobody from Plex cares, yet they chose to ditch the HTPC client on Windows. I guess it comes down to priorities.
Yep, Photos is a waste of time using Plex on my LG TV.
My photos are on an SSD on my server, and after a few minutes of browsing things slow down with minute long hangs until it just gets pointless.
At the very least have an option to “optimise” the photo library to a mirror folder containing thumbnails and resized (eg: resized 1080p versions) of photos, leaving all the original images untouched. Surely that would speed things up?
I’m running into the same problem… big raw-files of sony cameras are a pain to view.
Browsing in the albumview with thumbnails is great but “playing” the pictures is a pain.
