For a while now, the photo viewing experience on our TV has been completely broken, which is a shame, because viewing family photos is basically what we bought Plex for, and it used to work just fine.
Specific problems:
- Can’t see folder names in Library view, only thumbnails. This is extremely frustrating, because it renders the system almost completely unusable. Strangely, some folders retain their name and are missing thumbnails for inexplicable reasons. (see photo)
- Advancing photos requires strange double click. Once I’ve navigated to the right folder and subfolder by cross-referencing the folder thumbnails with the folder names on another device, it takes two clicks to advance to the next photo. Strangely though, it plays the animation as if it were switching–the entire photo gets a bit darker briefly. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that there every single photo were duplicated.
- Advancing photos too fast crashes TV. In an attempt to navigate the photos at speed, I can double-click rapidly upon which two loading spirals appear on screen which are overlaid on eachother. This frequently crashes the whole TV and it needs to reboot.
- Search completely function non-usable. In attempt to work around the issue, I attempted to use the search function to find a specific folder, yet this doesn’t work either. Specifically, when I enter a folder name, say “2012”, search finds it and it shows that folder and then it’s subfolders, but none of the folders appear selectable. A bit more clicking around revealed that the selection highlight box is simply invisible, and it’s still possible to select subfolders, but this only launches into a slideshow of the pictures in that subfolder and not actually entering the subfolder to find particular pictures. This renders it completely unusable.
- Photos slow. When I do somehow get photos to load, it always takes a couple seconds to load the next photo. This is annoying, because the server Plex is running on is a dedicated machine and the internet connections are all hardwired. A 6mb photo should load almost instantly.
- Album mode doesn’t show subfolders or pictures. When I change the library to show “Albums” instead of “Photos”, all the top-level folders show up (they’re all years so 198x - 2021) but selecting a folder doesn’t show any subfolders nor photos. Also, the “albums” don’t have any thumbnail pictures in this mode.
Semi-successful workarounds:
- Only for viewing recently uploaded pictures, if the folder containing them shows up in the “recently added” queue, it’s possible to enter and navigate the photos just like it used to be possible. No double-clicking required, and all names show up.
- Casting instead of using the Plex app, but this is lame.
Troubleshooting steps I’ve tried:
- Fiddling around with App settings (switching from “classic” to “modern” UI and adjusting folder view options)
- Restarting TV (multiple times)
- Checking for TV updates (it’s running Android TV 8.0.0, kernel 3.10.79, no updates available)
- Force quitting Plex App and starting it again
- Deleting all Plex App data and cache and logging in again
- Uninstalling and reinstalling Plex App from the Play store
So far, nothing’s worked–and this whole issue is frustrating because it really puts a damper on family photo night when half the time is spent struggling with a now non-functional app that used to work just fine a couple months ago. Has an update broken this? Can I somehow roll back to a previous version?
Photo:
Each folder here should have a year, like 2014 does. Strangely, 2014 doesn’t have a thumbnail and neither does the anomalous top-level folder despite them containing pictures. If I click into one of these folders, it shows the subfolders, but again, without titles.
Server Version#: 1.24.1.4931
Player Version#: 8.22.0.27533 (Android TV, Sony Bravia 2015)
