Plex Photos Folder / Album Organization is a Confusing Mess

Feature Suggestions
1

I am not seeing any support articles on folder structures. So does Plex intend that I just dump all my photos into one giant folder?

I try this and I go to library and add some photos to an “Album”, I then switch Library view to ‘Album’ which sets it to ‘Folders’ and not Albums. I go to ‘Playlists’ and here is the only place I see my actual ‘Albums’ that I added through Plex. When I am in ‘All > Photos > By Album’ the Albums are still my Folders not the photos I added to albums in Plex. I am sure this is about as confusing to read as it is to explain.

I am trying to make it so that I am not using a Windows Network Drive to take photos from a ‘Phone Upload’ folder and add them too whatever sub folder they should go into. I want to set up phone sync through the Plex app and completely manage them through Plex but Albums added through Plex only show up in Playlists and only Folders show up as Albums under Library… My head hurts just trying to explain it.

Seems you can’t organize your photos into albums without accessing the directories outside Plex.

Managing Albums within Plex should be creating a directory structure with your photos main directory behind the scenes. So if you were to lose your Plex metadata you don’t end up with a single gigantic folder with 3,000+ photos in it.

So which is it? Albums or Folders? Because this shows my Directory Structure not the Photos I have Added to Albums within Plex.

This is showing me my Directory Structure as well not my Albums added within Plex.

Playlists? This is showing all the photos that I added to Albums within Plex. So I wasn’t “Add to Album…” I was really “Add to Playlist…”.

TLDR… The Actual Feature Request:
We should be able to go to our Timeline and select newly added photos then have the option to “Add to Album” and “Add to Playlist”

Add to Album should work as it does within the GUI now but the Albums are actually folders and you are adding the photo to a folder.

Add to Playlist should work exactly like Add to Albums does now and add photos to playlists. Basically rename the current function to what it is actually doing.

Also fix the confusing naming I explained above.

I really hope this makes sense.

2

Some time ago, Plex made an odd decision to rename Playlists to Albums, but only in Photo libraries, and to not show these ‘albums’ on the Playlists page. This caused confusion, and they eventually reversed the decision, but they left some artifacts, and the “Add to album” menu items you are seeing are probably one of them.

The bottom line is this:

  • Photo Albums are actually Photo Playlists, and the “Add to Album” command should be renamed.
  • The View > Albums menu item should really be ‘Folders,’ as it behaves exactly like the ‘Folders’ view in other library types.
  • The ‘Folders’ view in Photo libraries may be redundant, because, if your photos are organized into folders on the storage drive, and the Library is pointed to the parent folder of that structure, the ‘Photos’ view mirrors the folder structure on the drive.

On the very few occasions where I experimented with uploading images from my phone via Plex, the photos are uploaded to a hard drive folder that I defined and, since that folder is under the parent folder that is watched by Plex, the photos are added to the Plex photo library.

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