I know that Plex focuses on moving pictures (so-called movies and videos) but it also supports Photos. However the whole Photo thing is nearly useless.
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Camera Upload:
While it works most of the time it likes to hang itself in an endless loop. I experienced this bug already two times. The first time Plex Android uploaded the new photos to PMS but afterwards still thought it had to upload the same photos. It showed “Remaining 3” and was continuously switching the shown image inside of the circle. The second time it didn’t uploaded the photos and thus kept showing “Remaining 7” and was continuously switching the shown image inside of the circle but nothing happened.
Restarting the phone and then starting Plex does not help. The same loop starts again. Resetting Camera Upload also doesn’t help. Completely wiping all App data, removing the App and reinstalling it actually does help. -
Photos library:
Viewing a photo library in “Photo Albums” mode is nearly useless because Plex Web shows every single folder as an individual album. If you have eg. C:\Photos as your library root and inside of that directory two folders named “Family” and “Nature” and inside of the Family folder another directory called “Pets” you’ll see “Family”, “Nature” and “Pets” in the main Photo Albums view. If you now open the “Family” album you additionally see the “Pets” album in there. Short in short the “Photo Albums” view is useless because it’s completely messy.
So back to the normal “Photos” view. Here you only see one album called “Family” (and if you open it you only see one album called “Pets”). This is how it should work. The problem here is that suddenly albums are shown at the very end, after every photo. It showed the albums before photos the last days so something has changed. Because Plex Web is not that fast with showing the photo overview it can take you some time to scroll to the end to finally open the album you actually want to see.
However, the main issue with Photos on Plex is that even 20 MP photos are NOT shown fullscreen or even large. Compared to the screen size the photos are tiny (~ 50%). This issue happens on Plex Web and Plex FireTV 4K. Plex Android shows the photos in fullscreen.
Another issue is the sorting / playlist. Assume you have 4 photos in an album and one sub-album as well and sort by “Date Taken Descending” (newest is shown first). Now you click on the very first photo. The photo viewer appears. You click next and (at least in my cases) the next photo (as shown in the album view) appears. You click next again and now you get a photo of the sub-album. If you meanwhile check the status info you’ll see something like “435 of 1878”. You are actually not watching the first photo of that album but instead one of all the photos in that album + sub-albums. The overview works with sub-albums, the photo viewer instead puts all photos of the actual album and all of its sub-albums into one stream.