I tried using PMS as cloud server for sharing my photo library (stored on detachable USB) to my family so they can view it on their mobile devices and upload and sync items. After short period of evaluation I found following issues/ missing features which have stopped me from further evaluation as the experience was really poor in that basic scenario. The issues are below in the most important order:
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Improve performance of gallery viewing on various devices (iOS, web client). The performance is really slow when you are viewing the photos and quickly scrolling the items. This has mostly to do with the transcoding which is triggered by client for each item when it is fetched from the server. In two cases above (iOS, web client) transcoding is not required when the image has only different resolution than client but the format is compatible otherwise. Even if it takes only around 1-2 seconds for each photo to transcode for scrolling quickly 50 items you need 1+ minutes. See next issue as well…
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Allow direct play for photos. Direct play option on iOS and web client supports only video and audio formats. The same should be allowed for photos which would solve the previous issue completely.
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Better support for detachable media (USB drives). I’m not sure what is the expected behavior when the drive is unmounted and PMS can’t find the items it has indexed before. I would expect missing items to not be shown in the gallery until the drive is mounted again and then continue to work as before.
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The sync limit for dynamic filter doesn’t work. Once this limit is reached and there are newer items that match the filter it keeps syncing them and it exceeds the limit. I would expect to remove the oldest items before newer items are synced. I have not tried the same with size limit but it might have the same issue.
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Syncing only the most recent N items. When you start syncing any album and set limit to say 100 items it always starts syncing from the oldest items and you end up with 100 oldest photos always. There is a workaround using dynamic filters and sort by date taken but still it doesn’t work very well. See previous issue above…
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Delete synced items individually. There is no way on iOS to remove single item from the synced collection.You can either delete the whole collection or nothing. Perhaps that requires more work for collections but it should be at least possible for single items which were synced using timeline.
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iOS upload takes long time. When the phone is in sleep mode the upload almost has stuck. It didn’t helped that the phone was plugged in to charger and left overnight. In the morning the number of uploaded photos was almost the same and I had to wake up the phone and bring plex app on top to continue upload faster.
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Managed users auto login. It should be possible for managed accounts on another device to auto login so they don’t need to enter their pin code every time they bring plex app on top.
