Plex overhauls photo features with automatic image tagging, design tweaks, more

Popular media management service Plex is today announcing a dramatic overhaul for how it handles user photos. In a blog post, Plex announced a handful of changes and new features coming to the platform for managing photos, including interface tweaks, speed improvements, tagging, and more.

First off, Plex says that personal photos are now incorporated with personal videos. Previously, Plex kept photos and videos in two separate libraries. Furthermore, Plex has dramatically overhauled the photo viewer on the service’s web client. As you can see in the screenshot below, image previews are large and vibrant and folders display their titles in a bold white text near the bottom.

Moving on from design changes, Plex says that it has improved the speed of importing photos by up to 300 percent. This change should significantly help those users looking to import a massive amount of images into their library and will likely encourage more people to switch to Plex form a competing service if they know the import process won’t take an insane amount of time.

The big news, however, is that Plex is integrating automatic photo tagging into its photo management features. Available only to Plex Pass users, this feature uses “advanced machine learning technology” and is able to automatically tag any photo with descriptors such as “kitten” and “Irish setter.”

But really, we wanted to help people understand their photo libraries. So starting today, our Plex Pass subscribers can now let Plex automatically tag all your photos with fun stuff like “kitten” and “irish setter” using advanced machine learning technology.

This is useful for a few reasons. For one, it makes it the process of finding a specific image significantly easier. For instance, searching for “puppy” will return results of images that meet that criteria according to the tags applied by the machine learning tool. Additionally, when viewing a single photo, Plex now offers up recommendations for related photos based off the tags.

Automatic photo tagging is available exclusively to Plex Pass users. Plex Pass subscriptions start at $4.99 per month.