Music and Photos Questions - New User

[darryl.langton 0]

Hello everyone,

 

I'm currently evaluating Emby as an alternative to my family's use of Google Play Music and Google Photos for storing and sharing our music and photos / videos. We've used the Google services and apps for several years, but only with a few fudges and workarounds. For example, since we've got a couple of Google Homes we now have to upload every new song we purchased to all of our Google accounts rather than being able to use a shared account. For photos, we stil use a seperate shared Google account, which is messy and awkward, but still easier than Google's fiendishly complex in-built sharing options :-)

 

I've set up a test Emby on an old AMD Sempton laptop running Linux Mint 18, with a selection of music and photos, and it's working well. It won't play home videos properly, but I'm sure that's due to the ancient processor, low RAM and slow Wi-Fi. That's cool. I haven't successfully trialled remote access or Google Home integration yet, but I'm happy that they should work fine.

 

I do have two questions though, which I hope someone can advise on:

 

1. Music - when the Emby app on Android or iOS plays a song, does it get cached to the phones memory so that, next time it's played, it doesn't get downloaded / streamed again? Google Play Music does this, which is a nice feature as it saves mobile data when accessed away from Wi-Fi.

 

2. Photos - is it possible for users to add photos / videos to an existing home photos & videos library directly from the Emby app on their Android or iOS phone, rather than needing to save files onto the server. For example, say an album has a number of photos in it already, but a user has a couple of relevang extra ones on their phone, can they upload to the album using the app on their phone?
 

Thanks in advance.

[ebr 16185]

Hi and welcome!  I'm afraid we don't have either one of those features yet but they are both very good suggestions.

 

We do have the ability to upload photos but they go to a centralized point and you don't choose which ones right now.  We also have the ability to download music to the device but it doesn't happen automatically as you described.

[darryl.langton 0]

Thank you for the reply ebr. That's a shame, bit I still think Emby will be a good solution for us in the future, if not right now.