I think the issue with Plex is they just don’t have enough developers to do any of the work.
Yes, they have been laying people of over the last few years. Which explains why they aren’t meeting users needs.
September 13th, 2024. That’s the first instance I can see where a Plex user pointed out that there was no ability to download our photos to our phone using this new beta app.
May 17th, 2025, @aubrey.wodonga acknowledged that this functionality was “added to the issues list a couple of days ago”.
It’s now November 20th 2025 and we still can’t. It’s particularly sad for me as I’ve had a baby in the meantime and all the photos that I’m sharing with grandparents via Plex can’t be saved to their phones.
@Atomatth- this is what your users mean when they say that the app feels dead. The last update that I can see for Android was 10 Jun 2025, nearly half a year ago. The last interaction from the previously-active dev on this thread was in August, 3 months ago.
As much as I appreciate we shouldn’t expect updates, we are indeed paying customers and the curent “BETA” app still does not have feature parity with the previous, deprecated, version.
I cross my fingers for a Christmas surprise.
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To be honest I think it’s one area Plex could really just say “we’re not going to support photos any longer”. We can see that they don’t have enough resources as-is to support their primary client software.
There are lots of other photo management apps out there that have way more flexibility.
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Launched the photos app recently after a hiatus to check out some old pics. Thought there might be some improvement since it’s been a while but it seems not.
Main thing is I have no playback controls for videos for some reason. Tried to rotate to full screen and it just snaps back to portrait.
Pixel 8 on latest Android 16.
Using the Plex Photos App v2025.2.0 on Samsung Galaxy S21 and Tablet S5e.
- In Library view, long-pressing a video reveals very few details. I suggest adding the duration and the release date (including time), as with photos. The date should reflect the value of a well-defined EXIF tag.
- In Library view, a video is listed with a Plex-generated thumbnail that cannot be customized. I suggest using the embedded EXIF thumbnail, if available, for consistent display across multiple players.
- Viewing photos and videos in landscape mode doesn’t work on my smartphone (Samsung S21), but it works fine on my tablet (Samsung S5e). I suggest supporting landscape mode for photos and videos on smartphones.
In short, all videos should be handled by the Photos app as simple personal video clips shot alongside photos, rather than as movies, and viewed consistently with photos.
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Camera Upload was a feature within the main Plex App for years. They removed it. It wouldn’t have needed development as a separate app, maybe just some bug tweaking on why the uploads stopped synchronizing once in a while.
Can you please add downoad feature for plex photos so that managed users can download the content from the Plex media server?
Sadly this feature to download our own photos has been removed from the separated ‘Photos’ app.
I can confirm that by installing the last known combined version of the main Plex app (10.28.0.3441) works well though (Android-only, naturally)
