I’m using PMS 1.10.1.4602 (the latest as of today) on a Windows server. I’m trying to use it to manage my photo library. I’ve found that the only data Plex will search on is the file name so I wrote software to rename all my pictures to the EXIF tags I already have set on them. This seemed to work but in testing I’m finding that only 30 results appear (3 pages of 10 results). And yes I let the library re-index. There seems to be no way to show all results. This seems to be a limitation on all clients I’ve tried (web client, iOS, Roku).
Is there any way around this? I’ve been using Plex for years for my movie collection and love it and it could be ideal for managing my photos but this will be a deal breaker. The whole point to me was to be able to effectively search on the EXIF tags I’ve set. My renaming system is not ideal but is workable but this search limitation won’t fly. If I can get this sorted I’d likely buy into the PlexPass subscription.
Plex is not really designed for managing your media, it’s intent is to catalog and stream. I’m not sure what you are looking to do, but there are probably better programs out there for managing your files.
I’m just looking for something that will allow me to tag photos/make albums so I can more easily find pictures down the road. I’d also like to view/search through this stuff on mobile devices and run all of it on my own server. Plex seems to do all of this with ease except the search limitations. This isn’t really a photo problem, it’s a Plex search issue that would relate to any content. i.e. have more than 30 movies with the keyword “snow” in the title? You wouldn’t see them all.
I would argue that Plex IS trying to get into the photo management arena with their new autotagging feature that is specific just to photos.
I’m open to other options if you have any to suggest. I’ve looked around and nothing else seems to have the device support (browser, iPhone, android, Roku, etc.) that Plex has.
Instead of a search you can create a custom filter in Plex Web. This will work for both photos and movies. The results will not be limited. You could then add these to a playlist/collection/album and view them on other clients.
Interesting, this works exactly like I’d want unfortunately it seems to only be available in the web app, which I never use and is probably why I didn’t stumble across this. I’d be looking for a solution that can work on the iOS app and roku. It’s too bad, because the other fields I can filter on like year and aperture produce search results just like I’d want on those platforms.
The iOS app filtering seems to be much simpler, not allowing ‘contains’ filters like you can do in the web app. Which is ideal so I can select two tags like ‘henry’ and ‘2017’ to search on.
@“todd@toddnelson.net” said:
The iOS app filtering seems to be much simpler, not allowing ‘contains’ filters like you can do in the web app. Which is ideal so I can select two tags like ‘henry’ and ‘2017’ to search on.
Yes, the filtering on Web is much more advanced. I thought you were searching for things so you could then do other things with them, which is why I suggested the Web App. Web is better for that type of stuff as with the apps, you can’t do anything once you find what you want except to view. If you just want to find stuff to view, I don’t have a suggestion. We are hoping to expand the filtering options on other clients to make them more advanced as well, but it’s not a very high priority at the moment.
Is there a way to specify multiple values on the iPhone filters? It seems like the answer is no, but if there is I could modify my program to inject the tag info into one of the available fields I don’t care about like aperture or lens and then filter on that. But it would be ideal if I could specify multiple tags like my example above.
@“todd@toddnelson.net” said:
Is there a way to specify multiple values on the iPhone filters?
No. Allowing multiple sort/filters criteria is something we are aware users have asked for and something we would like to implement in the future.
@“todd@toddnelson.net” said:
The iOS app filtering seems to be much simpler, not allowing ‘contains’ filters like you can do in the web app. Which is ideal so I can select two tags like ‘henry’ and ‘2017’ to search on.
Yes, the filtering on Web is much more advanced. I thought you were searching for things so you could then do other things with them, which is why I suggested the Web App. Web is better for that type of stuff as with the apps, you can’t do anything once you find what you want except to view. If you just want to find stuff to view, I don’t have a suggestion. We are hoping to expand the filtering options on other clients to make them more advanced as well, but it’s not a very high priority at the moment.
FYI my use case for wanting better filtering on the iPhone is that I don’t keep years of pictures on my phone. I sync them safely to my home server and index them with Plex. But if I’m out and want to quickly pull up an old photo to show someone it would be ideal to use Plex, which is indexing all my photos.
For now I’ve made a slight improvement to my tagging program to inject the tags not only in the file name but also into the “Camera Make” EXIF field that I don’t use. You guys expose that on all platforms seemingly. It’s still not ideal because I can only match on the entire tag, I can’t do a “contains” query to do a partial match on a set of tags. But it’s a little better.
At least for me, exposing this bit of ability in all the apps would be a gigantic step forward and I’d be more than happy to become a PlexPass lifer. I have a feeling there are many others who would agree.
