Photos Beta Feedback

I’ve only ever used Plex for streaming media, but I have a bunch of photos on my NAS that I use Synology Photos for.

How do I tell Synology Photos where my photos are? It doesn’t seem to be able to find anything. All 3 pages of the mobile app (Recommended, Timeline, and Library) are just hung with a spinning wheel icon. No Libraries to choose from either.

Something I have always really enjoyed with Google photos, Immich, and PIGallery is the ability to see some or all your phones on a map. Ideally, i would love for all my photos to show on a heat map with the ability to select an area on the map to see photos taken in that area. I know the functionality allows this for one photo already. Curious, will the map functionally be expanded on in future releases?

The app looks great. The feature I’m looking for is the ability to automatically upload pictures from my iPhone directly to my plex server. This is the number 1 feature that would drive adoption of this platform

2 Likes

I’d just like to add myself as a +1 to the concept of having the Photo App backup images from my cell / camera / album to my PMS.

Does it support heic/hevf/hdr photos?
I deleted my photo library on plex for the lack of support for these formats, before re-uploading 10 years of photos let me know :wink:

Nope. Not yet. And still doesn’t support metadata for rotation so all my videos and movies are upside down.

I know this has been covered before, but I get new photos almost immediately into plex

Create a new library called “new photos” or such

set up photo auto upload on your phone to a file location accessible to your plex server. I use the sync option on my home NAS server - but you can use your onedrive/gdrive folder on your pc

point your new library to this folder

Seconding this! I literally bought the lifetime Plex pass specifically for Auto backing up my photos just to see Plex remove that capability soon after. I love Plex, but it was a heavy blow, now I’m stuck paying for Flickr.

My dad literally called me this morning and told me he heard about the new Plex photo app and suggested looking into it to see if the auto backup is back; I like the new app so far, I’m not running into any problems, but I was disappointed to see that it still isn’t supporting the Auto back up.

Here’s to hoping!

1 Like

Splitting the photos into a separate app is imho a great step. Using a separate app for personal and family photos and video is much better then putting everything on one do-it-all app. Other well known apps also focus on one container of functionality and try do that very well. For example, Google separates Gmail, Agenda, Drive, Contacts and tasks into different apps. I like that approach much more then Microsoft’s ‘fat’ Outlook app, which is much slower in general use then any of the Google apps.

The first step for Plex would be to support Ultra HDR and HEIC images. In my case, pictures from a Pixel 7 (with Ultra HDR enabled) and an iPhone SE (HEIC) don’t display at all in Plex. Other server based apps like Photoprism, Immich and Synology Photos don’t have a problem showing these picture types. In order for Plex photos to be a serious contender in this markt, support for modern file types is mandatory.

Other features I would like to see are:

  • Clear distinction between a ‘personal space’ and ‘shared space’ per user. Make it clear to users which space they are viewing and make it easy to switch. Allow users to move photos from their personal space into the shared space. Ideal for families.
  • Full use of photo and video metadata in information panels, the timeline and for filtering views.
  • Example: Use a home video’s “date taken” property to determine the date/time of a video, instead of the date modified of the file itself.
  • Display videos and photos on a map (e.g. Openstreetmap) using GPS coordinates.
  • Use image recognition in photos for people, pets and objects. If possible, but this will be a challenge, do the same for video files.
  • Allows users to browse their collection via a timeline but also folder-based.
  • Automatic upload of photos from Android and iOS, including ‘sync’ between user actions in the phone gallery and Plex. What I mean by this is that if you use the Plex app to delete a photo from your phone’s gallery, that the uploaded version is also removed. This is currently possible with Synology Photos, Google Photos and iCloud.

I am curious what plans Plex has to make this app split a success.

4 Likes

Every single one of your points is extremely valid and very important for the Plex team to look into incorporating for the future of this stand alone application.

Looking forward to this :slight_smile:

What I’m mostly looking for would be phone upload for myself/family members, and local image identification/classification (scenery, tag suggestions, pets, etc), perhaps via guided ML training. Backup to a secondary device would be great as well.

Thanks for all the great work

PLEX ANDROID PHOTOS APP
9-15-24


THESE COMPLAINTS PERTAIN TO BOTH THE PLEX WINDOWS APP AND THE PLEX ANDROID PHOTOS APP.

Let me TURN OFF the color background when viewing a photo!

I do NOT want to see and no one else wants to see an amorphous blob of color when viewing a photo. This “feature” makes using Plex Photos as a presentation tool utterly unprofessional.

I don’t want/need to choose another color for the background. You don’t need to add complex new code, just a switch to turn off the background.

I’m sure someone there at Plex will say this is a trivial request and it should be ignored.

Plex Windows Photos does not recognize Canon CR3 RAW files. Canon updated their RAW format in 2019! WTF?

Plex Windows Photos recognizes Canon’s older RAW format CR2.

Microsoft Photos Windows 10 App displays CR2 and CR3. As does IrfanView and others.

No version of Plex recognizes Adobe PSD files. Please add this capability if you want to be taken seriously.

Does Plex know that their Windows desktop app is the Photo part is Broken? It now fails to read sub folders with an error message something like “Oops, something is broken. Start over.”

I had to reinstall a previous version to get it to work.

The Plex Android App (not the current beta) shows all folders.


THESE COMPLAINTS PERTAIN TO THE PLEX ANDROID PHOTOS BETA APP.

So far the Plex Android Photo app is way less useful that the Plex Windows app. You should bring the Android PHOTOS app features to the level of the Plex Android App before you add features or capabilites to the Android PHOTOS app.

There are no OPTIONS in the Plex Android PHOTOS app.

There are no PLAYLISTS in the Plex Android PHOTOS app.

How do I force a refresh the Plex Android Photo app? Can I?

The Plex Android PHOTOS APP does not show any thumbnails or the carefully crafted posters I created for my Photo library. The current Plex Android app does show both.

1 Like

One feature I’d really love to see is the ability to read keywords from xmp/exif – so you can filter keywords that are saved to the picture files. It’d be awesome to be able to just see pictures of a certain keyword, and would allow for some fun things in the “recommended” section like “Random photos of Steve” or “Photos of Colorado Trip 2019”, etc etc.

1 Like

Hi everyone! My name’s Simon, and I’m the lead engineer on the new Photos app. You may know me from some of my work on Plexamp and Plex Dash :slight_smile:

First of all, I want to thank everyone here for all the great feedback and suggestions. I want you to know I’ve read every single post in this thread, and while I can’t reply individually to every post here, let me try and respond to a few of the most common topics:

  1. HEIF/HEIC support (and other image formats)
    Unfortunately I don’t have an update I can share here. I know HEIF/HEIC support is a super important feature for a lot of people (as well as other formats like JpegXL, AVIF etc), but the work required to support these formats is predominantly on the server side. There’s an existing feature request here that you can upvote if it’s important to you. Additionally, I’ve raised the issue internally to discuss further with the server team. I’ll respond in the feature request thread if/when I have any updates to share.

  2. Photo uploads/mobile backup
    I know this is a highly requested feature, however it isn’t something we’re working on at the moment. I know this may be disappointing to hear, but I want to be transparent and make sure we’re not promising anything we can’t deliver. With that said, the door isn’t completely closed on this, and it’s a feature we may consider returning to in the future. For now, as others have shared in the thread, there are other apps you may be able to use to sync your mobile photos to a folder on your server that Plex can then scan and import.

  3. Performance issues, screens not loading
    As I’m sure you’re all aware, this is a beta app, and we’re still working on optimising things in preparation for the full release. I’m currently working on a solution to the screen loading issue, and hope to have an update available soon that resolves this. There are a number of other performance fixes in the works that should make for a smoother and snappier experience coming soon.

  4. Video playback issues
    Video playback in the current beta is quite rudimentary. For example, we’re currently not direct-playing, even where we should be able to. We’ll be incrementally improving video playback in future updates.

  5. Photo/Video orientation EXIF data
    The server currently doesn’t make this data available to client apps to consume and respond to as necessary. There’s an open feature request here, and I’ve raised the issue internally with the server team for discussion.


With the above out of the way, I wanted to share a few of the upcoming features we’re actively working on right now (in addition to bug fixes and performance improvements) that should make it into a beta update soon:

  • Timeline slider/jumpbar
  • Image sharing via the platform share sheet
  • More informative error handling
  • Fixes to some landscape layout issues
  • Internationalisation and translations

Thanks again to everybody who’s chimed in so far. Keep the feedback coming, and keep your eyes peeled for updates :plexheart:

7 Likes

Very nice app.
I miss to see from which library / directory a picture is shown.
I have duplicates and would like to clean them up.

Regards

HEIF/HEIC should be a priority, many phones shot in these formats by default now.
There are many free projects like Immich that deals with this easily.

8 Likes

I am unable to get past the login/sign up page. It seems like the buttons aren’t active.
Moto One Ace
Android 11

Are there any plans to add a “Slideshow” or “Digital Frame” functionality? Ie turn those old tablet devices into picture frames?

1 Like

This is so cool. SO glad to see this. A few comments:

  1. On the iPad, I can see my long name filenames fine. I have stuff like: “20240915 1587 The Regency Ballroom - Kishi Bashi” All good. On the iPhone, however, I can’t read the whole filename to figure out what I’m looking at. In the example I gave, it just shows “20240915 2597 The Regency…” unless I go into landscape mode. It would be great if it scrolled back and forth to show you the whole file name… Same problem in the Details view…

  2. Of course, SEARCH is hugely needed. I’d love for the search to read in all the filenames and be able to search within those file names. So for example - if I search for “Kishi Bashi” I’d want to find those images…

THANK YOU PLEX TEAM!!!

  • Jon

Timeline never loads…just sits spinning. Also can’t save photos to the phone?