Plex also has a premium “Plex Pass” option that costs either $120 one-time forever price, or $5/month, or $40/year. Apps for other systems like Xbox, PlayStation, and a huge list of other devices are often free. If you want to use the Android or iOS mobile apps instead of a web browser, each of those cost $5 as a one-time cost (unless you have a Plex Pass in which case they’re free). Plex Server has a free option that will handle all of the personal media streaming. Making a home VPN server is really easy with a cheap Raspberry Pi computer and PiVPN.io scripts. I’ve also got a VPN server on my home network so I can copy files to the server remotely and securely from where ever I want. I shoot everything in RAW, too, so I certainly don’t want to transfer those huge file sizes automatically. Having the manual option means I won’t have unexpected network usage or battery level loss since I will choose when the images sync. FTP isn’t a secure file transfer protocol though, so I’ll only use that on the local network. It also has an FTP server built-in, so I can turn that on and access the phone’s photo storage from a desktop (or any other FTP client) if I want to transfer files the other way. This open-source file manager has great support for SMB file shares, so I made a shortcut to my “2021” photos folder where I can easily move all of my photos whenever I want.

The “FolderSync” app for Android sounds pretty good for automatically copying camera roll photos to the server, but I think I want to have more control over my photo library now, so I’m going to manually copy photos to the server periodically using “ Material Files“. In the Plex Forums, there are a couple of auto-sync recommendations.

Still, I already have Plex, so let’s give it a try. The Plex apps have automatic Camera Roll Upload, too! This could be practically perfect… Oh wait, Plex is also removing the automatic Camera Roll backup feature in June of 2021.

Plex cost