Photos take around 5 seconds before full resolution

mrjbo4
Sun, 10 Aug 2025 23:12:54 +0000
Plex Players

When using the Plex Photos app on my tablet my photos appear slightly blurry at first, for around 5 seconds, before they are displayed in the higher/correct resolution. It’s a Samsung Galaxy S9+ tablet and connected to my 1Gbps up/down router via WiFi 6E. The photos are averaging around 8MB in size and Ookla Speedtest is reporting 176Mbps (22MBps) at the room I’m in (router several rooms away).

Thus, there’s plenty WiFi speed (and tablet horsepower) to allow near-instantaneous viewing at full resolution. The Plex server is running on a Beelink EQ12 (N100 CPU) and the photos on an SSD inside the Beelink to help speed up photo viewing responsiveness. If I exit Plex then re-load it and go back into the same photo folder, the photos I just looked at do show instantly at the correct resolution, suggesting Plex is ‘doing something’ - but that something needs a manual viewing first. I’ve recently built our ‘holiday photos’ library, containing hundreds of photos. When we come to viewing them I really don’t want to have to wait 5 seconds before the correct resolution is displayed.

I couldn’t see anything obvious in the Plex settings when logging into the Beelink PC. There are other options to make video thumbnails e.g. as a task, but nothing apparent that covers photos. Am I missing something…is there a way to force Plex to do whatever it’s apparently doing to let me see new photos at full resolution (relatively) instantly?

If I could ask another question?….with different cameras being used over the years, I have a bit of a headache in trying to get Plex to focus on the correct/applicable metadata date. In Windows 11, the ‘standard’ file ‘Date’ field does show the correct dates taken for the vast majority of my photos, however the metadata ‘date’ that Plex is using (if I order by date) is not looking at the same date field that Windows is using. I’ve a feeling I’m going to have to use something like ‘Bulk Rename Utility’ and/or maybe a PowerShell script batch file to copy date fields around. Does this sound about right? - because again, Plex seems a wee bit limited on what it can do for the sorting of photos.

4 posts - 2 participants