The original post: /r/selfhosted by /u/jswantekdds on 2025-01-22 01:42:54.

For those of you with self-hosted media servers, I thought I would share what I’ve done that has brought my family loads of entertainment.

My wife and I have thousands of videos of our kids on our iphones that we rarely ever look at. So using the facial recognition in the photos app, I created an album of all of our kids videos on our phones. I then used the “PhotoSync” app to send those albums via SMB to a folder on my server. That folder is linked to a “other videos” Plex library. If you go to the folders view in that library on plex, you can choose to shuffle the whole folder of videos. So now we can sit and watch our kids videos whenever we want. We love it and our kids love it! We probably have hours of footage but all of the videos are typically 15 to 45 seconds.

One caveat is that I’ve noticed that Plex on some devices (like my Nvidia Shield Pro) will play all of the videos in landscape mode even if they were filmed in portrait mode. To fix that, i have PhotoSync send the videos directly to a handbrake watch folder on my server. The videos run through handbrake and then get saved to the library folder.

Just thought I would share!