Having read nothing, I was expecting to have a lightweight app that would cycle through the photos on my old iPad as a slide show. I believe there are many folks who want to use old tablets as digital photo frames
What I received was cycling between seeing a list of photos on my media server I can’t play and Nothing to SeeContent added to this library in Plex Media Server will be displayed here every minute or so.
Playing a slideshow works in the full-blown Plax apps.
I have setup a Photos share in Plex (Ubuntu). Everything is leaded and server is idle.
After starting up the IOS Plex Photos app (On iPhone 15 Pro max) and selecting the Share from my Plex server, the app crashes immediately.
No idea what I am doing wrong?
It’s a nice start for viewing photos. The regular plex app usually crashes a few moments after scrolling through a folder of photos. This app really needs the ability to download photos before it could replace the normal app even with its instability.
Really great line of development here, glad to see effort being out into the Plex Photos app! A primary reason I use Plex is for displaying personal photos and videos on the TV.
I’d gladly use it to backup photos and videos locally as well.
Some initial feedback: In basic testing I was not able to get images to load – they showed up in the bottom strip, but the photo pane just said “Failed to load image”. I can provide logs if any exists.
Will Plex Photos be read only? I store my photos on a nas via a photo management backup app. I don’t mind plex being able to read them and display, I just don’t want it making changes.
I pointed iTunes to my music storage once and it acted like it owned the place. I don’t need that with my photos.
Confusing: Albums, Playlists, Recommended hubs but no Collections
So, now that I’m taking a deeper look into my Photos library I am noticing that Plex hasn’t standardized on when something is called an “Album” versus a “Playlist.”
The second thing is that we have a Recommended page and a Manage Library option but photo libraries do not allow the creation of Collections, which is how us, server admins, would control what appears on the Recommended page, as we do with Movies, TV Shows and Music.
Then the question arises, what is, or should be, the difference between a Playlist, Album and Collection when it comes to Photos?
To me an Album or Collection are the same thing: a group of photos that are categorized/filtered. A Playlist would be a group of photos in a specific order to be display one at a time (most likely with family or friends like in the olden days of slide projectors).
EDIT:
Also, why is the “Library” separate from “Timeline?” Isn’t a timeline just a different way of sorting a library?
Something needs to be done to help combine but sort/filter photos from home videos. We use to think of home videos and photos separately because separate devices were used to create them. Plus, the way we experienced them was different too: printed/slide photos and home video filmstrips.
Later our cameras and phones allow us to take both with a single device and also display them on a single device.
However, I do find myself, and others, wanting to mainly only share photos or only share a specific home video. It’s odd/embarrassing when you are attempting to share photos to find yourself playing a video. Videos are usually more intimate because they capture more than just a single image.
On the flip side, when doing modern slideshows, mixing photos and videos can sometimes be nice because they both add context to each other depending on the subject matter (i.e.: a birthday party).
I agree, that is how it must be done now. But it’s rarely a good idea to use a folder structure to categorize items into their relationships. The reason being is that a single photo might need to be categorized in several different ways: event, location, people, emotions, etc.
This is why databases are great. You can provide a structure to place an item into and then you can build multiple relationships between those items.
This is what Plex does with our Movies and TV Shows. Plex dictates a file naming/folder structure to store the items into, but then Plex uses its database to build relationships between those items: Playlists and Collections.
Plex also has the ability to identify a photos as a photo and a video as a video. Thus, Plex being a tool for organizing our media, it would be helpful if they could expand their photo/home video tool to do this separation.
Another issue not addressed is a standardized way of naming our photos or folder structures for them. Plex somewhat does with home videos (using the same as our Movies and TV Shows) but it doesn’t really fit the, “take photo or video” and dump it, or upload it, to a folder that is meaningless other that a place to store such media.
Movies and TV Shows are very structured by their creators/studios. Home Videos and Photos these days is just snapping and storing them in a catch all; very unstructured.
It’s somewhat similar to how Plexamp is forcing people to create separate folder structures for Christmas and Non-Christmas songs/albums. I think Elan is finally coming around on dealing with that mess (at least I hope so, since he blew it off a while back). We shouldn’t have to create different folder structures for the type of items being stored. The sorting/categorization should happen through the metadata (either in the file or in the database).
Using the current beta, I don’t see a scroll bar of any kind. I have over 15k photos, so it would be nice to scroll with a scroll bar or some other way of scrubbing past many photos at once. This is in both the timeline and the library views.
There’s also no pinch-to-zoom in the timeline or library views to enable the thumbnails to be larger or smaller. Would be nice for accessibility.
Finally, I don’t see a way to multi-select and manage photos (e.g. delete a single or multiple photos). Again, would be super handy.
I am extremely impressed by the performance! This has the potential to overtake Immich, PhotoPrism, and Synology photos as the preferred means of viewing one’s photo library.
The app needs a way to create albums
A win would be automatic albums based on location, tags, favorites…
The app should have a way of displaying metadata values. At a minimum embedded comments, titles, and keywords
The app should be able to read sidecar files
An option to overlay a photo’s EXIF comments and titles when viewing images would be a big win. I don’t think any app allows for this today
Search is necessary. Search should not only include file names but also metadata content (EXIF, IPCT, XMP…) and location
It would be nice if a future version would include face recognition, done server-side.
Sharing via the OSs external apps (email, mms…) should be added.
Sorting by Filename, Creation Date, Date Taken…
Ability to view all subfolder photos within a folder
I did notice a bug where if if I have an image full screen and then rotate into horizontal view, the image disappears.
After loading low res version of large file (50+MB JPEG scan of 6x6 negative) new photo app fails to load hi res version, regular plex client works properly
So far, it’s an ok experience. I like the design choices made throughout the application. In my head, it has the same feel as Plexamp and Plex Dash. What I believe the application needs is some more refinement and a little polishing of its good areas.
But, being a beta, it has its pain points. The timeline view is miserably slow to load. I have two photo libraries in the tens of thousands of photos/videos and its pretty rough with both. Secondly, viewing photos is somewhat broken for me. In the gallery view with the preview, it takes two swipes to get past images that I assume are partially loaded. Tap to get rid of the preview and it’s great. Tap again and the app jumps back to the image the preview was closed at.
For reference, I’m on a Samsung Note 10 running Android 12.
As for features, I’ll try to keep it reasonable considering the current level of support.
I’d like to see support for common and increasingly common formats (server side) like GIF and HEIC. I don’t think anyone cares about AVIF, so that could be left out for sake of scope.
Photo uploads from mobile and download for server content. Ideally, this would include mapping the phone’s folders to those server-side instead of automatic-only or none.
Tags API (if it doesn’t exist). I know AI is the popular thing, but it’s also hard to get right. My vote is that anything beyond a basic tagging model that can run on the CPU should be out of scope.
If it’s going to work as a standalone app, then 2 things are needed. 1. A Massive password protected photo dump ( plenty of other posts already on what features should be here ) and 2. A way to create slideshows/presentation out of those photos… Maybe the streamlined plex app can only have access to the slideshows and not the entire disorganized dump.
I like the UI so far and I could see myself adopting it as my primary Photos application (currently I use Nextcloud and still have some on Google Photos). However, the primary requirements I have for photo applications on mobile devices are…
Ability to easily view photos (seems good so far)
Ability to sort photos based on minor criteria (date added, date taken, etc)
Ability to sync photos from my phone’s camera roll to a server (which does not seem to exist yet)
An option to easily share the photo, like a quick button to share via snapchat, text, socials, etc (this does not seem to exist yet…)
