Hi SimonXCIV, et.al.
I’m now able to try the Plex Experience preview. It seems that all my iOS devices have been “updated” and now have removed the ability to show my photos library. (except ATV, which still has the 8.45 client with photos and music.) I’ve also noticed that there have been few updates to the new photos app of any substance. And I need to remark that the app is more frustrating than useful for me. It teases that it might show photos, but most of the time it doesn’t really. I don’t see a minimum viable product here. My wife keeps telling me that Plex is broken on her iPad. So here I am in your forums again.
About your new app:
There are 3 views or tabs along the bottom, “Recommended” shows some thumbnails, and most of the time I can touch a thumbnail and see a full sized picture, other times I get a screen that says “Failed to load image.”. However most of my photos are not available in Recommended - and I don’t understand why they are recommended. Actually, I do get it with the recently added being recommended, but the other two I’m shown are Photos from 1976 and Photos from the 1990s. Why are those recommended? What constitutes a recommendation? The recommendations are different on different devices - so are they just random? Why does Plex think I need recommendations for my photos? I rarely go back to those dates unless I want to include them in a slide show. I have the same question about the recommended tab on the old Roku player app. I notice that it does not appear on the ATV player.
I’ve never seen the Timeline view, but can imagine what it might look like from Apple Photos. Every time I select the Timeline I get the spinning circle of infinite wait. It’s stuck there and I have to force quit the app to recover. I’d recommend that you consider for all your apps that waiting is not a deadlock, but rather that when you are waiting, it is still possible to back out of the operation or jump to a new one.
The Library view crashes about half the time I select it. The other half I get a directory listing of my photos library. If I drill down into the directories, I eventually see thumbnails of photos, and sometimes I can select a picture and see it full size, and other times I see a “Failed to Load Image” screen like I just described before. Every so often, the picture does show up, but after about 30 seconds of black screen. And then there is the frustrating part, the picture that shows up after about 30 seconds, is often then removed and “Failed to load image” is shown instead. Oddly enough, in this case I can still click on the info icon and it will tell me the filename and the exif info from the image that “failed to load.” I can almost laugh because It seems like the app is rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory 8-). Another disconcerting behavior is that thumbnails are inconsistent. If I scroll up and down the app redraws the thumbnails and changes them! Yes, the content of the thumbnails change as I scroll. The quicker I scroll, the more they change.
Last and most importantly - I have not found any sort of way to see a picture slideshow. If you recall, this is one of my prime reasons for using Plex. I want to be able to have my pictures slideshow on my TV with music in the background. As an aside, this only seems to work on Roku. The ATV has buttons for slideshow and random slideshow, but it never progresses from the first picture (version 8.45 or .46). And if you do work on the slideshow - please add the configuration menu to set how long a photo is shown. I seem to recall that this was available at some time in the past (but I might have mistaken it with Apple Photos)
My recommendation for Plex Inc. - if you want to keep your users - is to continue to make the old style application available while the new ones are being developed. At least until you reach feature parity, or perhaps indefinitely as an archived experience. I’d also recommend that your new “features” should be opt-in and never forced-in. That just alienates users.
Finally, It seems to me that for a media server product, you would consider advancement to be more integration of media types over time, and instead is seems like we are getting more disintegration. I’d very strongly recommend that you reverse that direction.
