Plex is taking steps to make its app experience more streamlined. Starting today, users can download the Plex Photos app beta for iOS and Android as a dedicated way of accessing just their personal collection of photos. Over time, the main Plex app will become exclusively focused on movies, TV shows, discovery, and its recently added social media community. The company will continue to develop the Plexamp app as a dedicated way to access music from a Plex Media Server.
Initially, Plex Photos will be limited to mobile devices, but the plan is to add support for more devices by 2025. By that time, the company is aiming to remove photos and music access from the main Plex app.
The moves were announced on the Plex blog, along with a rationale for the changes. Plex says that music playback is currently used by only 2.5% of its community and photos are accessed by just 0.2% on a monthly basis. “By migrating these features to dedicated companion apps,” the blog post said, “we can concentrate our development efforts on creating the best possible experience for the media types that our users interact with most frequently. This also reduces the complexity of the Plex app, making it faster, more responsive, and easier to use.”
For now, the Plex Photos app is a very spartan experience. You can swipe through your photos, zoom in to see more detail, and you can pull up metadata info like location, camera used, aperture, etc., if that information is contained in your files. You can favorite individual images for easier access later, and the app can organize your collection with a timeline or folder view.
Unlike Google Photos or Apple’s Photos app for iOS, there’s currently no way to edit images or share them, however Plex has said it’s planning several enhancements like improved search, casting to TVs, and “seamless integration” with your existing Plex Media Server library.
A dedicated photos app will make it much easier for folks to access their Plex pics, but it remains to be seen how the company will encourage more use of the Plexamp music app. Plex integrates the Tidal streaming music service (for Tidal subscribers), but that partnership comes to an end on October 28, 2024. No new streaming service integrations have been announced.
Over the years, the Plex Media Server has grown from being a place where folks can organize and access their personal collection of movies and TV shows into a true multimedia experience with support for photos, music, and access to FAST channels, rentals, and more. As a result, the main Plex app has become a fairly crowded experience, despite having a generally excellent interface. Creating dedicated apps makes a lot of sense, much as it made sense for Meta to break out its Messenger functionality from the main Facebook experience.
This emphasis on companion apps goes beyond what Plex is building in-house. It’s also expanding its developer program and creating open APIs (application programming interfaces) to give the dev community the opportunity to build new experiences on top of the Plex Media Server platform. Some examples given were new apps for e-books or podcasts.
