It hasn’t been updated since. Last time I asked about it earlier this year was that they devoted all resources to the new “Plex Experience” app so didn’t have anyone to work on the Photos app.
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even if they speed up the development in the future i think it will take years for us to have a good app if ever. this is not good!
Chiming back in to say that my photo app now no longer works. Can’t wait around for an app that is taking steps back in quality, so I’m deleting and moving on to a different photo management app (or just sticking with the default Plex for photos until its deprecated). As a lifetime Plex Pass user, deeply disappointed.
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Agreed. My photo app no longer works.
Try signing out and signing in again. Worked for me.
That said, the app hasn’t been updated since its initial release and is lacking in many ways.
I tried out Plex Photos today, there are a few features I’m missing or are not working well which I’d like to see improved, especially now you’re taking away the photos experience from the main app:
- Casting support: Seems a rather basic function to have in a photos app, but I don’t see where I can cast using AirPlay or Google Cast. A dedicated app for Android TV and the Apple TV is quite unmissable too.
- Support for video libraries: I have a separate library for home videos and photos, as we used to make a lot of videos in our family. Right now that library appears in the new Plex app, but not in the Photos app, so I have to switch apps now (or make my home video library a photo library).
- Mobile uploads: Speaks for itself.
- HEIF support: Still hoping this will be added at some point.
- Timeline: App doesn’t respond anymore after clicking on the button. My library is very large (20 years of photos, several hundreds of GBs), but this should just not happen. A temporary “fix” could be to give the option to disable the feature as a crashing app is confusing for my parents.
I hope you still put people on the development of this app, personal media sharing is the sole reason I use Plex, and from reading on these forums I am far from the only one who does so.
The Photos app - as limited and basic as it is - will play videos. At least mp4 videos. But you’ll probably need to have them in a library of type Photos.
I’ve posted on another thread something about the Photos app
Forgot to mention: Please, remove the Recommended tab. Or at least hide it or don’t make it the default view when opening the app.
I hate these Recommended listings.
That would indeed be a solution @Yaracuy. Furthermore I agree with you on the suggestion in your linked post — the library view should show previews of our albums, instead of solely showing titles. As my older albums are just named by their date, it has become impossible to find something quickly without the photo preview. I’d also like the album view to be default as well.
To start with, the photos app needs to, at a bare minimum, work as well as in the main app:
- Timeline doesn’t have the scrollable timeline down the side like it does in the main app.
- Library doesn’t show a preview of anything in the folders like it does in the main app.
- App struggles to show photos in landscape mode
- Videos freeze and cannot be played in landscape mode.
- Missing playlist functionality. I have saved slideshows in my library that do not show up in the app.
- Search should be added.
This seems more like an alpha release than a beta. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t at least start with the chunk of code in the main app that shows photos.
I know lots of people want to be able to upload photos using the app, but I would hope you make the base functionality the priority before even thinking to start implementing that. However, if you could eventually get the app to offload photos from the phone into the Plex server, that would be a game changer if it worked well. Currently I connect my iphone to my PC, offload the photos, and then move them into the appropriate folders I have created on my server. Automating that would be incredible.
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I’ve been wanting to use this app for a while, however, they did an initial release then nothing in like 7 months…
The fact this was pushed out without mobile upload speaks volumes.
I really want to use Plex for all my media, including photos but this is a shocking release for a beta, this is like a alpha over anything.
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Removing photo library support from main app before this is stable and has at least the same functionality, was real bad move. 
- fix login (resetting process when swapping back from password manager / authenticator is terrible design)
- add slideshow
- add casting
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The ability to download and share (original quality photos) is also my #1 request!!
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I don’t even get it to run, when checking the logs of the photo app, it seems it tries to reach a staging server:
ERROR Error fetching anonymous user {
"type": "[object Error]",
"stack": "Error: REQUEST_ERROR: (404) https://staging.api.plextv.dev/api/v2/users/anonymous\n at construct (native)\n at apply (native)\n at _construct (/Volumes/workspace/DerivedData/Build/Intermediates.noindex/ArchiveIntermediates/Photos/BuildProductsPath/Release-iphoneos/
All other apps work and have checked my firewall - everything is open. More people have this issue? Obvious to state - i succesfully log-in and can select my available users on my server.
Hi all,
I know it’s been a long time since I last posted an update in here, and for that I apologise. We’ve been flat out working on the main Plex app (first the release, and since then, the weekly fast-follows with fixes and improvements).
Thankfully, with the new shared architecture, a lot of these aforementioned improvements are able to be shared with the Photos app, and so I have a little bit of good news today; we’re now in the final stages of testing a new update for the Photos app with a generous list of fixes. I know it’s been a long time coming, but I’m hopeful that once this update is out, we’ll be able to follow up with some further improvements before too long.
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Will this fix searching too? Currently searching for photos is completely broken. Can’t search for it on the xbox plex app, can’t search for it in Plex app. There is no search in the Plex Photos app.
The only way search works if I search in a browser… which kind of defeats the purpose of using an app.
I’m hopeful the new version of Plex Photos works as the current version 0.3.0 is most frustrating. Displays library for 20-30s then displays “Nothing to see”. No difference when on local network or via internet remote. Any timeline for the next release?
IOS 18.4.1
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I’d love a good photo app for sure.
To be honest, it’s not there yet (but I think you guys know that). Absolute minimum I think at the moment would be
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Automatic or at least manual upload from my device (iOS for me).
If I had to manually choose which images, that would be fine, I take a lot of garbage photos, but I should be able to click the app, and select easily a bunch of images to push to the server and store for both ease of viewing as well as backup. -
HEIC is required for sure. Not much point in having a photo album that doesn’t support the native files of half of it’s users.
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I’d put AI as a requirement or at least very close. I’m not sure if that’s practical, but it’s pretty standard to look for images of food, or travel, or by regional area. This is very close to a minimum requirement now. Certainly hard because of AI costs and whether it can be rolled out practically, but if I can’t see all of my photos in a way similar to how I would expect on a phone, then it’s real purpose is as a backup solution for images.
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Map based display - I’m not sure if this is minimum, but it’s close as well. I travel, so images by location is important. By country, city, area and even location is ways that I view content. Often, the location is as important as the date, whether it’s because it’s the easiest filter, or because it’s a better context for viewing. Eg, I may not want my photos from 2024, but I may instead want travel photos from 2024.
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Uncluttering the junk. The biggest game changer feature (I think the others are not game changes, they are minimum requirements), would be to discard junk. Perhaps not by automatically purging, but by at least identifying things that may not be worth keeping. Either because you have 25 picture versions of your meal, it could pick one and flag the rest as perhaps not needed. Or it could be the 5 billion photos I have of menus, signs, serial number or other junk that I needed for that moment, but don’t need ever again. If it could categorise them as “informational” or “potentially unwanted” then I’d be a very happy camper.
The idea of a photo app is a good one, but currently, photos are extremely unlikely to make it from my device to my server. So overall, it’s of no value (yet). But a way to back up my images, see things grouped in helpful ways (like ai driven object detection, metadata geo grouping and more contextual searches for grouped ideas of images) then it could be brilliant.
I look forward to seeing updates. But it’s not something at this stage that I can use.
Thanks,
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This release is available now. You can view the release notes here:
On iOS, 2025.1.0 does not see any photo libraries and I’m unable to access images. I just see a “nothing to see” on all pages and a “No Library” in the top left.
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Plex Photos 2025.1.0
Pixel 7
Still can’t scroll in landscape for more than three photos and still no ability to download photos to the phone.
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