Today I got surprised that in the Plex web app it is not possible to download multiple photos in a batch after their selection. I can only add them to a library, but neither the library files cannot be downloaded in a batch. Am I missing something or is this feature really missing?
P.S.: I have a local server only, running on QNAP NAS, accessing the photos/videos from both by Android devices and through your web app
Iām looking for this feature too, very odd that the ādownloadā option is only available when selecting a single photo.
Itās a current limitation of the app, Iām afraid. All downloading is at the file level and we donāt (yet) have anything that zips/batches them. Iāll raise an issue to see what we can do.
I thought I would use PLEX to assemble photos my fathers funeral. What a HUGE mistake.
The entire family came over. We viewed PLEX on the big screen. Scrolled through thousands of photos only to find out PLEX has completely half-assed and half-baked the āPhotosā approach which is effectively like leaving the steering wheel off the carā¦
If PLEX is actually reading this, how about instead of jacking around with efforts to monetizing our photo data (new photo tagging feature - which requires photo to be sent externally) , perhaps we spend 4 seconds to fix the lack of ānon-negotiableā functionality that was clearly a miss on part of PLEX and your business (or IT) owners.
Bottom-lineā¦free extensions on Chrome can bulk downloadā¦ why canāt a paid app like PLEX?
So, if youāre using AGILE (or as bastardized version thereof) of IT development (i.e. No accountability with āiterationā being the smoke and mirrors for lack of key functionality, akin to leaving the steering wheels and a gas tank off your car, perhaps you should reconsider that approach to development.
If not on AGILE, then clearly someone didnāt think this through.
So, net-net a result of someones incompetence or āme-too - gotta hit a milestone, even if itās a half-assed launchā, I am now spending hours to prepare for a funeral and redoing all this from scratch.
If you canāt do it right, donāt do it at all - itās just that simple.
What a disappointment! I just bought a 1-year Plex pass, and one of my reasons was to be able to add my family to the account to share photos and videos of my kids. And of course they want to download many of them, to print them, use them as wallpaper, etc. But that seems to not be possible. Hell, using the web app I canāt even right click on my own photos and download them.
Am I missing something, or is Plex really incapable of this most basic of functions?
If PLEX is actually reading this
hi!
efforts to monetizing our photo data
Just to be absolutely clear - this is just not true. If you choose to use the autotagging feature then small thumbnails are temporarily stored on Imaggaās servers for analysis - https://support.plex.tv/articles/234976627-auto-tagging-of-photos/ There is no selling of your data, metadata or anything else.
You want to adjust slideshow speed.
Iām hoping we get this added soon. Itās in our backlog of work and a few recent forum posts have certainly raised its priority.
Bulk download photos
Also in our backlog - but dumb question so I can add more context to the issue, what do you need this for? Do your family want to use another service/print them?
Iām sorry to hear itās not working for you, especially at what sounds like a horrible time.
is Plex really incapable of this most basic of functions?
You can download single items from the library page:
or the player:
But somewhat frustratingly this isnāt available for users who donāt own the server. Iāve raised an issue for discussion to fix that.
Hi Dom,
I saw your earlier post in here and took a chance hoping youād see my concerns. You did. In all sincerity, thank you greatly for taking the time to respond. Most companies have these forums simply as echo-chambers to give users a false sense of resolve (or at least a place to vent). Clearly, this isnāt the case with PLEX and based on your reply, I can see PLEX is committed to their users.
As a result of your reply, frustrations aside, I speak highly of PLEX then as I do now for your teams ongoing commitment. Thank you.
That said, I did want to reply to your email. Since formatting always seems to be a challenge on all forums :), I broke this into 3 key sections below.
##1: Resource Prioritization/Data Monetization ##
@āDom Cā said:
Just to be absolutely clear - this is just not true. If you choose to use the autotagging feature then small thumbnails are temporarily stored on Imaggaās servers for analysis - https://support.plex.tv/articles/234976627-auto-tagging-of-photos/ There is no selling of your data, metadata or anything else.
1. My point was thisā¦ Why not commit development resources to fully baking existing core functionality rather than chase new features which will just lack more core features or create more work when existing work needs to be completed? Iām guessing it took a non-trivial amount of development resources (probably 10x of simple basic functionality weāre asking) on both PLEX and Imagga teams to implement photo-tagging that a fraction otherwise could have gone to fulfill existing user requests.
2. Aside from my key point (resource allocation), reading Imaggaās privacy policy, it seems to read as if they can do whatever they want with our data, thus my comment. Perhaps PLEX has individual B2B terms with Imagga that supersede the āwe can do whatever we likeā terms they have posted publicly?
3. At present, Imagga privacy policy does seem to be a bit of a āPrivacy Casinoā. In other words, if you play (i.e. upload data) you are effectively gambling with your privacy at your own risk. This includes but is not limited to their ability to monetize users PII or Non-PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data.
Per https://imagga.com/privacy:
1. "However, although we make efforts to protect your privacy, we cannot guarantee that the Service will be immune from any wrongdoings, malfunctions, unlawful interceptions or access, or other kinds of abuse and misuse."
2. "In any case, as long as you use the Service, we will keep information about you, unless we are required by law to delete it, or if we decide to remove it at our discretion."
3. "At times, we may anonymize your Personal Information so that you cannot be individually identified, and provide that information to our partners."
4. "We use anonymous, statistical or aggregated information and may share it with our partners for legitimate business purposes"
ālegitimate business purposesā = We (Imagga) have the right to sell your data if we want to, even if we donāt exercise that right today - we can and will.
All of the above appear to be proverbial āGet out of jail freeā cards. āJust trust usā is what weāre leaning on absent of additional terms that otherwise supersede this language - thus the driver and concern I raised.
5. If photo tagging is truly a cost driver for PLEX, and not a revenue source, then I commend PLEX and stand corrected on PLEX monetizing our data as this is not usually the norm, but make no mistake, as written today, Imagga has the right to monetize our data from what I see written in their āsmoke meets mirrorsā privacy policy. I want to be wrong about any data being sold or monetized (outside of PLEX if youāre not doing this), so if something exists to the contrary, please help me see where we have protection from PII or Non-PII data being monetized given the statements from Imagga above?
##2: Slideshow Speed##
@āDom Cā said: Iām hoping we get this added soon. Itās in our backlog of work and a few recent forum posts have certainly raised its priority.
Thank you for this!!! This is big.
##3: Bulk download photos##
@āDom Cā said:
Bulk download photos
Also in our backlog - but dumb question so I can add more context to the issue, what do you need this for? Do your family want to use another service/print them?
Iām sorry to hear itās not working for you, especially at what sounds like a horrible time.
Thank you for the condolences and concern. That means a lot to me. 
To your question for context - use case is such that photos are an emotional experience and families and friends look at photos together and **as @āScott the Linguistā conveyed in his post, folks want to take action on photos after they view and favorite them **- In many cases those actions are needed in bulk. Those actions need not happen in PLEX, but having the ability quickly export the photos in bulk to do so elsewhere is key - otherwise itās pointless to use the photos feature in PLEX if youāre only to have do so elsewhere and repeat the entire viewing process.
With photos (and even other content for that matter) organization and content export are the key pillars of success to accomplish most use cases
To PLEXās credit, you have organization NAILED - hands down.
However, content export is what is sorely lacking in photos and itās the key enabler so we can take our action outside the PLEX platform. In my case, our family needed to collectively pick from 6,000 photos and export a subset to make a video slide show with music synced (thinkā¦VEGAS/MovieMaker/FinalCut Pro, etcā¦)
Additional context - In my case, my father passed away and I wanted to put together a video slideshow to memorialize his life with our family I scanned in 6,000 photos over 3 days prior. Once the A/D conversion was complete, viewing and picking from the 6,000 photos of course was going to be a family effort and of course, PLEX has been good at most everything else, so it seemed like a natural fit.
**So the entire family sat down using our NVIDIA shield and 70+ inch TV with PLEX as the client (not server) and were wowed at first, until I couldnāt find a way to speed up the slideshow **and my non-tech inclined family kept getting annoyed asking āwhy is this so slowā¦can we speed this up???ā as **we had 6K photos to view and after an hour of searching, realized this basic function was ācoming soonā several years back. So, like everything nowadays, I switch into āworkaroundā mode.
THIS IS ONE OF MANY REASONS BULK DOWNLOAD IS NEEDED ā> āWorkaround modeā for no slideshow speed = Scrolling in thumbnail mode, all of us viewing the photos, āheartingā the photos we liked. We marked 500 photos. I made the naive assumption I could export these in bulk (even if 500 pop-ups in Chrome - which is an easy fix to workaround) from the āfavoritesā album that creates. So as you can imagine, when I found out I couldnāt even export the photos we invested an entire afternoon viewing, needless to say I was going to miss my deadline to submit the proof for viewing and test the next morning at the funeral home.**
So to the suggestion of individual downloadā¦ As Iām sure you know, clicking download is frustrating when you have to do that 500 times in addition to waiting for screen transitions and other cutesy stuff. In the end, I got up at 4AM the morning before the funeral and downloaded all 500 photos individually one by one and probably missed a few along the way. Add that to resetting my workflow outside of PLEX to make the movie (since I didnāt have what I needed up front - time cost is compounded).
The consequence of PLEX not having the bulk download feature was me being late to the funeral home for the early family arrival. Because of this, to take my mind of more emotional matters, I kept thinkingā¦ At what point will be people learn the consequences of seemingly harmless decisions and deferring āboringā but critically needed functionality code work?
An ounce of investment in time from PLEX upfront pays 10x dividends to your users the end. 20 hours (generous) of DEV work by PLEX would save humanity 100K+ hours annually (or perhaps millions depending on user base) of manual work or the enormous frustration and heartache of realizing theyāre SOL last minute like happened to me. Saving time for users without creating trade-off, is how real value in product development is generated. Not by feature quantification, hence my commentā¦ If you canāt do it right, donāt do it at all.** The backlog of problems it creates only drives long term unsustainabilty (beyond job security) with overall workload.
In any event, I thank you and do appreciate you pressing for these key pieces of functionality as well as taking the time to listen and respond. My sincere hope for everyone if ever faced with this situation is they donāt face the same level of frustration and heartbreak I did.
Best regards
Why not commit development resources to fully baking existing core functionality rather than chase new features
Itās a constant balance. We are aware that some of the core functionality needs some attention though and are working on addressing that.
reading Imaggaās privacy policy, it seems to read as if they can do whatever they want with our data
I understand your concerns, and privacy policies do often seem weasely, but to be clear āyour dataā is a thumbnail of an image, without reference to you. They tell us they delete those images, and they know they came from āPlexā, but thatās it. I donāt see a risk here, but please let me know if Iāve misread your concern.
Slideshow Speed
Iām also keen to now get this in and think we now have a UI that fits. Iāll hopefully push on with this soon.
Bulk download photos
ā¦ folks want to take action on photos after they view and favorite them ā¦ In many cases those actions are needed in bulk. Those actions need not happen in PLEX
I very much agree, and think your statement around ātake actionā is 100% spot on, but you can imagine this is not the case for other (not personal media) content in Plex. This means we need a specific path and UX for photos which is possible, but not the default.
Iāve raised issues with the relevant teams to see how we can progress this.
An ounce of investment in time from PLEX upfront pays 10x dividends to your users
So I agree in the sentiment, but I hope you understand we have a finite amount of ounces, and working out which have the best dividends is not always obvious.
In the case of photos, to speak candidly, the last 18 months have seen us try to level up support of them as a media type in Plex so they were on a good standing with our support for music and video. I think weāve mostly acheived this - however, important base features that may not be relevant for other types (such as slideshow speed or bulk download) may have fallen through the gaps as we tried to ālevel upā.
I hope we can address these two, and any other glaring oversights, in the very near future.
Thanks for the thoughtful and careful reply. I always appreciate constructive discussions in here, and again am sorry that it was all tangled up with such a frustrating and hard time for you.
DOM I would really like the batch download because often I am taking pictures for work, family etcā¦ and even as low as 15-20 pictures that I would like to send off to people is immensely quicker and more convenient if I can download multiples at one time and immediately ship off the zip folder etcā¦
I was trying to do this today and it was frustrating me because I moved over to Plex instead of iCloud, google photos or amazon drive (all have their issues but they at least can download batch files at once).
Thanks for reading and replying to these comments. I just wanted to voice up so this gets more recognition.
Yes, the possibility to download multiple selected photos is a must. All of us would appreciate if you can prioritize it.
+1
I am quite surprised as well that this feature is not standard.
+1
Hi, this feature should be definitively available. My family, like others, is not just digital minded to browse photos albums. Every years we create a photo book with our favorite pictures. This work is definitively painful when you can just download pictures one by one.
+1
Just ran into the same issue while sharing holiday snapshots with friends and family. Photo download functionality is a key requirement for this kind of application, but Iām not surprised the Plex team missed this while being transfixed on the auto-tag gimmick. Good to see they acknowledged the gap.
5 years and this feature is still not available? I listen to a lot of audio books that usually get packaged in individual mp3ās by chapter and having to download 50+ chapters of a book 1 file at a time is very cumbersomeā¦any eta on multi-file download? no need to zip them just have the download option create a simple queue and download the files from the queue, the exact same way a playlist watches them.
Hi DomC,
Itās been almost 6 months since cxv01ās very well explained summary and your last update on this topic.
Have either of the features (bulk download and customizable slideshow) been started, released, or had any other progress made so far?
Personally Iām more interested in the bulk download options; I share very similar use cases to those already described, and like most others was surprised (and frustrated) not to find any Download option after selecting multiple photos, or indeed being unable to download a whole album.
+1 if youāre still not convinced you have enough user support! Iām currently paying a monthly Plex pass subscription, and Photos is the only reason I use the product. The premium plex features arenāt why I pay though, Iām not overly fussed by the tagging itās cool, but not necessary to me - I pay because I believe the core product is worth it. However, missing features like these does make me question that a little!
Iām currently running Server Version 1.12.3.4973 - if the latest update has added these features, please let me know!
Thanks
+1 for bulk download please. This should be a core feature. I paid for a lifetime Plex Pass assuming these basics would be covered. Cheers
I wanted to commit more to Albums so Iāve written a script to do this. I hope others can get some use out of it. Sorry I donāt have time to write it up properly, my coding is rusty.
Youāll need:
Script (note Plex Photo Albums are actually playlists in the API):
import os
from plexapi.server import PlexServer
from plexapi import utils
baseurl = 'http://localhost:32400'
token = 'XXXXXXXXXXXX'
plex = PlexServer(baseurl, token)
playlists = [pl for pl in plex.playlists() if pl.isPhoto]
playlist = utils.choose('Choose Playlist', playlists, lambda pl: '%s' % pl.title)
for photo in playlist.items():
photomediapart = photo.media[0].parts[0]
print ('Download File: %s' % photomediapart.file)
url = plex.url('%s?download=1' % photomediapart.key)
utils.download(url, token, os.path.basename(photomediapart.file))
Hi @DomC or any other Plex Employee for that matter. Itās been quite some time since bulk download of files was apparently prioritised higher. And still I canāt find this feature. Can anyone please provide a reasonable explanation why such this feature is still not available? Especially considering quite a lot of people need it. In my personal opinion the lack of this feature is nothing short of embarassing in an otherwise very good piece of software.
I understand that you have limited ressources and need to carefully allocate them. It is just hard for me to understand what seems to be so problematic and time consuming in creating a bulk download feature.
+1 here for bulk download (or album download)
Iāve finally gotten my wife working with our Plex server, and she went through all of our pictures of the past year and added 200 to a āfavā album so I can easily move them to an online photo store to print up some Christmas presents.
Turns out there isnāt anything easy about this.
Can we please have a status update with an ETA as to when this is expected to be under development?
