Plex Media Server isn’t just a great solution for organizing your movies and TV shows: it’s an all around personal media Swiss Army knife that includes solid support for storing and displaying your personal photos right alongside your other media.
Why Use Plex for Your Photos?
There’s no shortage of ways to store and display your family photos these days, but there’s a certain allure to using Plex Media Server to do so. And if you’re already using Plex for your other media organization needs, it’s trivial to set up.
In addition to a solid stable of basic features like like support for multiple photo libraries and playlist building for custom slideshows, there are some fantastic premium features for Plex Pass subscribers, including timeline-based photo viewing (instead of simple file browsing), as well as automatic tag generation similar to the automatic tagging found in full fledged photo storage services like Amazon Prime Photos and Google Photos.
What really makes Plex stand out compared to the cloud-based services isn’t the tagging or timeline features, however, but the double whammy of local storage benefits. Not only does Plex give you the ability to keep everything right on your local network if you so desire, but in doing so, your photos won’t suffer any space saving compression tricks like they would if they were uploaded to, say, an unpaid Google Photos account. And, unlike many solutions for photo storage and display (like, say, uploading your photos to Google Photos and then browsing them on your TV using a Chromecast), Plex offers a similar smooth and well organized experience but without your photos leaving your local network and floating around in the cloud, if that’s something you wish to avoid.
Setup is really simple (even more simple, believe it or not, than the already easy setup of Movie and TV libraries on account of there being no third party metadata to wrestle with), so let’s dive right in.
Preparing Your Photos
Like other forms of media you add to Plex, there are two big things to keep in mind. First and foremost, Plex will never alter your actual files because all the data it uses is stored in your Plex Media Server’s database. Second, file organization matters (although, in the case of photos, not as much if you have a premium Plex Pass membership and prefer the timeline view).
With that in mind, the best thing you can do to prepare your photos for storage and display in Plex Media Server is to organize them in the fashion you wish to browse them. We have a strong preference for organizing our photos into folders with a YYYY-MM-DD [optional descriptive name] title format like 2015-12-15 Christmas at Grandma Fitzpatrick’s House—but you can use whatever organization format works best for your needs. In addition, we would encourage you to use a format that doesn’t nest lots of folders into each other (one folder for…
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