Support camera upload for iOS Live Photos

Live Photo backup would be a great (essential) feature for iOS users.

It would be awesome to have such a feature.

Without Live Photo support photo backup feature on iOS is not compete so if Plex is marketing it as photo backup solution please add this missing part. I am also looking forward for this feature in Plex.

Still no news, still misleading wording on their marketing page suggesting it’s safe to delete your camera roll after Camera Upload did its thing.

No ETA is a policy you can roll with when you’re timely or can demonstrate why things are taking their time, if you do neither and don’t even reverse your old marketing that leads to actual data loss then you’re doing your customers a big disservice to put it kindly.

One more asking for this.

I’m the one that reported the lack of this functionality as a bug back in 2016. Plex has yet to even acknowledge that it’s a bug or even a shortcoming. The majority of iPhones on the market have this feature, and there’s only two OSs that camera upload is used for. Please don’t alienate half of the customers.

The larger concern is for users that aren’t tech savvy enough to realize that using this service does not make it safe to delete photos from their device. I am sure average users have used this feature and deleted a live photo without ever realizing they lost the video portion of their live photo forever. If this is not going to be implemented soon please at least put a warning in the app that Live Photos aren’t supported and that data will be lost if a live photo is uploaded using this services and then subsequently delete it from the device.

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Seriously Plex, if you are in this game if you want to be on top of your game you have to accommodate all the little seemingly trivial things. Live Photo’s are already a big deal to those who realise the magic of the captures in time they create and soon they are going to be one of the most popular photo formats. You need to get this feature supported and actually go all out to get any new video or photo feature developed for upload, this is going to win you new subs.

+1 plexpass mbr, this is a vital function needed going forward. Please get this out soon, it’s become a hassle to backup my photos with other software. Plex used to be my one stop shop for all digital media needs.

+1 Plexpass member more! the lack of Live Photos is the only thing that keeps me from using Plex not only as a Video & Music, but also as a Photo Server!
Would be FANTASTIC to have this added :slight_smile:

Another upvote here. I was hoping PMS could be my photos backup solution but without Live Photos support it’s incomplete.

+1 vote

Is there any updates regarding Live Photos support?

Yes, please! Without this feature the camera upload cannot be used as a backup strategy rendering this feature useless for all iOS users.

Plex is not meant to be a backup solution; and the lack of this feature hardly renders camera upload useless to ALL iOS users.

(TLDR AT THE BOTTOM!)

I’ve been waiting for years for a developer to create an easy, consumer-friendly way to view Live Photos on PC directly from the hard drive.

Right now there is seemingly NO way to view Live Photos on PC except by viewing them in your web browser via a couple of cloud photo services, which want to bill you for storage. Or you can convert them to GIF, which degrades the quality and still doesn’t provide a proper “Live Photo” experience (in which you could animate the photo by simply clicking on the still photo itself or an icon next to it, or pressing a key).

I haven’t used Plex yet, but plan to eventually, and I purchased a lifetime Plex Pass subscription. It would be wonderful if Plex provided a way to properly back-up (export) Live Photos from my iPhone, including the video component, and also made it easy to view the animation the proper way on PC.

There seems to be a decent-sized market niche for any kind of software that could simply display Live Photos properly on PC.

When I first realized that the Dropbox app had NOT been backing up the video component of my Live Photos in addition to the stills – and realized that the animations had been permanently lost for all of the Live Photos which I had already deleted off my phone – I was pretty bummed. I stopped deleting photos off my phone for years, hoping someone would come up with a proper solution. Fortunately, I learned that Google Photos backs up the video component of Live Photos in addition to the stills, and you can view the animated photos in your web browser via the cloud; but there is still no good way to view Live Photos stored on your PC. And you have to be careful if you rely on Google Photos for backup, because if you delete photos off your phone the normal way they get deleted from Google Photos as well – you have to use the “Free up space” feature in the Google Photos app if you want to retain a copy of the photos in your Google Account. (Also, Google Photos plays the animation on a loop, so it’s not even a true Live Photo experience in which the photo animates a single time on-command. Furthermore, I have to take the extra step of manually downloading photos from Google Photos when I want to add them to the media collection on my PC.)

My only solution so far is to create a playlist in VLC Media Player in which each Live Photo animation directly follows the still it correlates with. Then I can use the keyboard to pause on the still as long as I want, and then advance to the animation component on-command. I had to tweak some settings in VLC so that filenames aren’t displayed, and so that the control panel isn’t displayed while in full-screen view, for a smoother experience. And I have to make sure the items are in the correct order in the playlist
 
It’s really not an ideal solution – I just want to be able to click on the still to play the animation! (Or press a key.) Yet there appears to be no software available that can perform this relatively simple function on PC!

For people who take Live Photos, the animation is an integral part of the photo. When you take the photo, you are capturing that moment in video form as well, and you naturally want to be able to view it seamlessly on PC just as you do on your iPhone. But it doesn’t seem like many developers recognize this or are seeking to address it, other than the big cloud services. There are probably a lot of people who want to be able to back up Live Photos to their own personal media library without paying Apple or Google for cloud storage forever.

Developers must all be Android users! 
I’m not even joking – they probably only use iOS when developing apps for it, since Android is better for tinkerers.

The only other solutions for iPhone + PC users are to pay for iCloud or Google storage and go there to view your photos. But even then you have to wait for the video component to download for every photo before you can view it. So it’s not a seamless experience by any means. If Plex had this feature, it would still be slow viewing them over the Internet, but it WOULD be a seamless experience when viewing via the local PC hard drive or server machine. It would be great!.. And as of this moment in time, it would (apparently) be the ONLY consumer software that can do that on PC!

I have never been able to find a consumer-friendly way to view Live Photos on PC that doesn’t involve viewing them in a web browser via the cloud. This need/niche has been sitting unfulfilled for years. With my mind set on Plex for my future media management, viewing, and sharing needs, I was hoping to find that they had already addressed this, but apparently not yet. They could probably draw in a good number of new subscribers by offering Live Photo export / viewing for Plex Pass members. (Facial recognition would also be a big draw.) They would just need to implement that feature, and then encourage someone to write an article about it which will turn up in the Google search results for “live photos on pc”, and some number of people with the same needs as us will be drawn in.

Because, as I said, it would be the ONLY solution for this particular set of needs. It would be a local alternative to the cloud photo services. It would provide a much smoother Live Photo experience on PC. It would integrate with the rest of your Plex media library. It wouldn’t be free, but it would be a lot cheaper than paying for cloud storage forever, especially with a lifetime Plex Pass subscription.

TLDR: The “Live Photo” experience shown here is currently not available on PC, except via a small number of cloud photo services: https://developer.apple.com/live-photos/
Other than those cloud services, there is no way to properly view Live Photos on PC. 
It’s crazy! And viewing them via the cloud services is NOT a smooth Live-Photo experience.
Plex should add this feature. It could gain them some number of new subscribers. It would be attractive to any iPhone user who has ever taken a Live Photo and wanted a way to preserve and view it locally, or who doesn’t like iCloud / Google Photos for any reason.

3 Likes

Any updates coming?..I’m now going to use google photos and pay for the 100gb plan to store my photo roll
even though I have a perfectly fine plex server with redundancy and offsite backups scheduled
 when plex photos enables Live Photo’s then I can get rid of google photos and stick to plex


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Something new here? Hope this will implement asap. So its Not an actually Feature

Please support HEIF/HEIC/HEIV. Almost TWO years ! Respect your users


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FYI, as an alternative solution to cloud storages, all the Synology NAS support Live Photos backup and playing in their photo backup software called Synology Moments, plus it allows to run Plex Media Server as a docker container.

However, this feature is really much needed on Plex, especially since Apple has released an SDK for playing Live Photos that works in javascript.

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Can someone from PLEX please acknowledge our request?

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Please add HEIC support!

1 Like