I’m a Plex lifetime user as well. It’s truly stellar for video management, but I vastly prefer a (read: this) dedicated music management tool for audio.
I keep both Plex and Emby around, as I still can’t decide which to keep for my home cinema setup. Both of them are much of a muchness in handling my Movie/TV libraries, and neither of them meet my requirements for management/display of my Photo library. Both, of course, are light-years away from Roon for handling my music library.
The fact that Plex tries to handle ALL of my media is certainly a frustration, but it works well with only limited libraries deployed. Recent development seems to be focused on video and DVR television, so the devs seem to be on the right track, focusing on their core product.
I hear good things about the Synology Photo Station package, so I’m going to give that a try. Here’s a lengthy rundown.
From a cursory glance at the Synology software, it won’t meet what I’m looking for. Support of Exif metadata is only the start. I’m looking for photo management software that understands the IPTC Core standards for descriptive tags. Having support for People/Face Tags using the MWG standard would be also good. The Synology review mentions general and facial tagging, but no details are provided about the underlying standard(s) used.
If it’s proprietary, I have no interest in painting myself into a corner a few years down the road, and have to redo thousands of photos.
What I’m looking for is a photo library display system that (for example) when cousin Fred and his wife Mabel drop round on a visit, I can, with a few clicks of a mouse, assemble a slideshow of that time when we [Fred][Mabel][Me] were at that [restaurant] in [Barcelona] in [1997] - and just show the photos that have both [Fred] and [Mabel] but not [George] in them on the big screen… I can do this using my photo management software on my desktop PC - but I’d like to be able to do it on the HTPC to share the photos with everyone.
I too would love a “Roon for photos”. Maybe we should move this over to new thread in … Uncatagorized?
Daniel, it’s certainly off-topic here, but then again, photo management should be off topic for Roon in general. If we are not convinced that CD ripping should be included in Roon, then photo management is right out from the start…
I was just venting that media management systems such as Plex and Emby profess to be media management, but focus on a narrow subset of media…
That makes sense. As photo metadata can be highly subjective, it should be fairly stable and user-owned.