I have several thousand photos on my DS213j NAS, all put there via the Synology uploader programme which uses the power of my laptop to create thumbnails of every picture which are then stored on the NAS as well for speedy display when called. I have been using the DS Photo App which allows me to view the photos on my IPad Air and this allows for rapid selection of photos and swiping between them but as a new convert to Plex I would like to display my photos through that instead along with my music and films etc. However, I have found that whilst the thumbnails load quickly in plex, the full screen pictures can take 8 seconds or more to load making selecting and viewing unuseable in comparison to DS Photo.
Whilst I am most concerned about usability of photos on plex for IOS, I experience similar delays in accessing photos using my Apple Mac.
Could I be doing something wrong or is the current version of plex slow with photos?****
Plex doesn’t use the thumbs you generated, but has to make their own, in the size needed by the player.
As such, the transcoder is generating the thumbs, draining your CPU, and causing the delay, IMHO.
But to test, revisit some after the initial visit, and are they also slow then?
/T
I think you are right. On second visit to a picture I have accessed through plex once already it certainly loads more quickly but still more slowly than using DS Photo. If you are right it also sounds as if I will have to accept delays on initial loading of every picture in my collection which is extremely disappointing and I am more inclined to stick to the DS Photo route instead.
I would have thought that plex thumbs would have been created during the library update process if it could not use existing Synology ones. Doesn’t that sound sensible?
The problem is, AFAIK, that some players req. thumbs in one dimension, others in another dimension.
Due to that, Plex creates them instead on demand.
/T
I guess I can understand that but DS Photo seems to have got round that issue.
Thanks for your thoughts - I will forget plex for photos for the time being as, regrettably, it is not very user friendly.
Also, DS Photo also supports albums with photos + videos, which is not the case of Plex. Plex only supports photos.
Very true. Plex is still an excellent product though and I will continue to use it for films and music. If the photo side improves I will pick it up again. Thanks for your comments.
@oldgit I experience the same problem and I hope that Plex will improve the photo section soon.
Same problem here with Synology RS812+ and and Apple TV 4 which makes viewing photos unusable.
Why is there no way to pregenerate everything for selected players/devices?
Same here. It would be so nice to have PLEX load the images faster, right now it’s unusable 
Hi there, I’m using Plex also for my photo library which is over 1 TB. Indexing took 2 days but this was ok. Now when I explore the photos it takes quite much time to enlarge one photo and it’s not eben the full size. Can’t plex just show the original size of photos instead of creating another smaller version? Please improve that. All other features work pretty awesome for me and I don’t want to use another software only for my photos.
Same here, photos take forever to load.
As explained in a previous post, Plex uses its transcoder to rotate photos and generate thumbnails. When PMS is installed on ARM devices this takes too long (video transcoder is disabled on arm platform, but photo transcoder is not).
I have an ATV3 and one way of reducing the impact is to rotate photos manually before trying to display them (I use JPEG Lossless Rotator) and negating photo transcoder. Probably this trick is plex client specific.
Thumbnails is another story… The only way I found acceptable is to let them generate in the background while I’m viewing full photos.
@moody_blue said:
As explained in a previous post, Plex uses its transcoder to rotate photos and generate thumbnails. When PMS is installed on ARM devices this takes too long (video transcoder is disabled on arm platform, but photo transcoder is not).I have an ATV3 and one way of reducing the impact is to rotate photos manually before trying to display them (I use JPEG Lossless Rotator) and negating photo transcoder. Probably this trick is plex client specific.
Thumbnails is another story… The only way I found acceptable is to let them generate in the background while I’m viewing full photos.
How exactly can I disable the photo transcoder. I am running Plex on a WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra with I believe some type of ARM processor, and despite a extremely fast wired connection neither my Iphone 7 nor laptop can view photos quickly. They take nearly 30sec to load. I can access the network share and view the same photo and they display in full quality instantly. Is there some way to direct stream photos the similar to what can be done with videos, as every client device should be able to play these files (JPG and MOV in my case)?
One thing that I’ve done at the time was to replace one HDD by one SSD and put the Plex folder there. That really helped, although not as much as disabling phototranscoder, which is impossible, at least for the moment. Of course I had to totally reinstall my Syno because Plex folder needed to be on volume1.
Plex started recently a “task force” to improve photo support, who knows if this will be one improvement ? But knowing Plex, improvements that just started to be evaluated will take a long long time until being available.
In the meantime, as you are a PP user, maybe you can Sync photos to the devices that have enough storage space.
The thumbnails are already loaded for me but it still takea 1-2 minutes to load the fullscreen photo. Why is that? Im running plex on a seagate personal cloud. Videos load instantly. Photos take forever.
I have the same issue on a DS216j. I’m in the market for either a new Synology NAS, or a NUC to move the PLEX server to with the existing NAS… Which NAS model would fix this issue for certain? I’m eyeing a DS718+, a DS918+ and a RS818+ at this time… Having this functionality working is the most important aspect, video transcoding is secondary… I have lifetime PLEX pass… rack-mounted is not essential, but I prefer it.
