All of my photos have keywords embedded in them. I’ve yet to find the ability to search for photos in a Plex library by keywords. Am I missing something?
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Yes, we need to be able to search and browse based on keywords.
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Wow, you skipped right over our carefully added tags only to implement some online “auto-tagging” by a third-party. How disappointing…
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Agreed - I don’t want to let an automatic tagging feature loose on my carefully-curated tags. No clarity from Plex either on whether the tags will conform to industry-standard tagging. All the tools I use for photo tagging implement the IPTC Core tags specs and the Metadata Working Group face tags specs. If Plex don’t follow these standards, I’m not interested.
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https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/234976627
Tip!: Your original photo is not modified or altered by the tagging process. The tags are stored in your Plex Media Server.
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So - of no interest to me then. I’m not going to paint myself into a corner and build up tags (which I can’t/don’t define), and that are stored in a proprietary database (the Plex Media Server).
I’m in the “The Truth is in The File” camp, i.e. metadata belongs with the file. This means that the IPTC/XMP and EXIF metadata is central for management of my photo library. Having metadata held outside the image files may be necessary for performance reasons, but the content must always reflect the metadata in the files themselves.
A rather good analogy that I came across is this… Imagine that you have an album of family photos. It’s full of photos of members of your family stretching back several generations. Underneath each photo is a handwritten description of who is in the photo – that is the metadata for the photo. It’s a marvellous resource for you and your family – a record of your family history. But over time, the glue degrades, and the photos become loose. Worse, many of them become unstuck. What do you have then? A pile of loose photos, and an album with blanks where the photos should be – and no way of knowing which photo should go where. The metadata has become separated from the photos.
What’s the solution? Well, what should have been done in the first place is to write on the back of every photo who is in the photo before sticking the photos in the album. In other words, the metadata should be directly associated with the photos themselves. Then it doesn’t matter if the photos fall out, the album can always be reconstructed. Indeed, a new album can be made when the old one falls apart.
And in this analogy, “new albums” means “new software applications and operating systems” The one thing we can guarantee in computing is that hardware and software will change rapidly, but industry-standard metadata specifications such as IPTC will move more slowly, and the standard can be re-implemented in the newer generations of software.
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I couldn’t agree more with gcoupe. Due to past experiences with simple photo management apps, I really didn’t expect Plex to make use of the standard embedded metadata in my photos, but I was really hoping it would. As it stands, Plex does provide a simple way to view a library of photos across multiple devices, but it is far from being useful for finding a particular photo in a large library of photos. I am very satisfied with how Plex manages movies and TV shows, but for personal media management, it would be very useful to be able to read embedded metadata and make use of it for searching/filtering/finding that particular photo or home video of interest through the UI without needing to remember the actual file name or directory path/location within a library.
@gcoupe said:
Agreed - I don’t want to let an automatic tagging feature loose on my carefully-curated tags. No clarity from Plex either on whether the tags will conform to industry-standard tagging. All the tools I use for photo tagging implement the IPTC Core tags specs and the Metadata Working Group face tags specs. If Plex don’t follow these standards, I’m not interested.
@gcoupe What tools do you use for photo tagging? I’ve got my music ID3 squared away, so my photo library is the ‘last frontier.’ I’ve been investigating Photini (I’m on Linux), but I’m wondering what experiences others have had.
@beckfield - I’ve been using Photo Supreme (and its predecessor IDimager) for years. Best DAM tool that I’ve found. I also use Lightroom, but really only for its digital negative development tools. It really can’t compete on the metadata management side with Photo Supreme IMO.
That looks great. They call it “cross platform,” though, but it’s only Mac/Win.
I would like to my 0.5c here. If you are serious about photo management, you already own some tools (e.g. Adobe Lightroom) to manage them. Using that tool you tag your photos as soon as they are hitting your systems. Personally, I have more than 32000+ of photos. All tagged using keywords, tittle and captions.
Plex is working on top of it and shows my photo library on my big screen or mobile devices. More I can easily sync the ones I want to have on the road.
What am I missing? To be able to display the IPTC info and sort/search using the IPTC info inside plex. The automatic tagging cannot be as precise as what I have accomplished so far. I really miss this feature. I search for some tools doing that and so far could not find any… Plex is so closed that this is frustrating me!
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Hope you all voted here:
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Requests for Plex to give proper support of embedded metadata in photos have been raised in these forums since at least five years ago. And still nothing has been done of any value (the automatic tagging feature is worthless to me).
This is getting beyond a joke.
I’m so glad I checked this thread. I quite a while trying to figure it out while I was in the App. It didn’t occur to me that Plex wouldn’t have included the basic functionality of “I just want pictures of my son”
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I’m late to the game in this thread but it appears the situation is still the same - no support for the tags I manage in my photos. I read the comment about 5 years (or more) since the need to support photo tags was broached and am disheartened. Anyone have a clue why this difficult and/or hasn’t been a priority? Any significant library can’t be accessed effectively without an index. Going to folders and virtual shelves is crazy.
Same for me. I’m using tagging informations stored directly into my pictures via EXIF and XMP (GeoTagging, face recognition via RegionName, RegionArea, …) and so one.
I need to have those informations displayed on the PMS to search on that keys as well.
Is this taken in consideration?
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This thread has 2 years old , and still no improvements for this needed feature 
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Dear Plex product owner, if you don’t listen to your users, people will not take your product seriously. This is also the reason why I cannot be motivated to subscribe to your paid service and recommend your products around me.
@pickymartin said:
Dear Plex product owner, if you don’t listen to your users, people will not take your product seriously. This is also the reason why I cannot be motivated to subscribe to your paid service and recommend your products around me.
I would say that it is even worse as I go for the paid subscription to have some “more voice” for the future development. I did not see any request for the DVR stuff, which is useful to only some of us, no request for the “automatic tag” of photo… I too have the feeling that we are not listen too…We even never got an explantation why it is not developed.
Ability to search for photos by keywords is really needed
