This discussion was created from comments split from: Feature Request: Manual Tagging.
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IPTC tags is definitely something we need to consider! I meant tags from online services, which Iāve clarified now. The feature request https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1367849#Comment_1367849 has 52 votes. Iām curious if you know what apps support them and generate them? If I do tags in Lightroom, Aperture, etc are they IPTC? Or in their own metadata DB like Photos app on Mac?
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As far as I know, most apps actually use/write to the āXMPā section of the fileās metadata rather than IPTC. In particular, the ādc:subjectā area of XMP. The Windows apps that I have used that write this metadata to XMP are Windows Live Photo Gallery, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and J River Media Center. Iām pretty sure that Lightroom has the option to do the same.
It would also be good to support a tag/keyword hierarchy which I use extensively. That is, various levels designated by a character separator in the keyword similar to file system paths (e.g. āPlaces/Illinois/Chicagoā).
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Support for the IPTC tagging standards was first asked for over five years ago. Itās still not available in Plex. Clearly itās not important to the developers of Plex.
TL:DR - look here for an introduction to photo metadata, otherwise read on.
The IPTC is an organisation, which first defined a standard for photo metadata (known as IPTC IIM) back in the 1990s. Since 2008, this original standard has been replaced by IPTC Core, which uses XMP as the underlying mechanism to define and handle photo metadata.
All decent photo editors and management systems, and even Windows (and I believe OSX) support at least some, if not all, of the IPTC Core standard. Itās a continuing mystery to me why Plex continues to ignore it.
A word about support of a tag/keyword hierarchy. Even in the latest IPTC standard from 2016, a standard way of handling keyword hierarchies has not yet been defined. Windows Live Photo Gallery (now no longer supported by Microsoft) uses the ā/ā separator in keyword lists to define the hierarchy. Other tools may use different separators (e.g. the vertical bar character ā|ā). Adobe has defined its own way of handling keyword hierarchies, using XMP, and this has become a de facto standard, because it has been implemented by third parties in their own tools (e.g. Photo Supreme) for interoperability. The Metadata Working Group has attempted to set a de jure standard for keyword hierarchies, but this does not seem to have taken off. However, their standard for image regions (e.g. faces in a photo) has been picked up by Adobe Lightroom, Picasa, and Photo Supreme.
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@gcoupe please, Iām trying to have a conversation about this instead of throwing around accusations like āitās not important to Plex Developersā. I understand why you feel that way, butI wouldnāt be trying to help and ask questions if I didnāt care, so letās keep it constructive.
To be frank, Plex has ignored Photos for too long, and Iāve been tasked to help try to fix this. Thereās much more I can learn about Photos, and Iām trying to understand the lay of the land, both from an online service perspective and a application management
The list of software that actually support the latest IPTC standard from 2014 appear to list a bunch of things Iāve barely heard much about, so itās definitely stuff I need to look into more.
But even the full list, the only app that jumps out at me is Lightroom (wow, ACDSee is still around?!) but I do see Photos can export using IPTC, which is awesome: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH21336?locale=en_US
One of the feature requests I asked the devs how much work would be, for us to add to the metrics list is to look at the metadata in the Photos and mark how many they have with certain metadata fields filled out, like geolocation, IPTC, etc. Just so we have an idea of how many users out there actually have photos which have this data (weāre not logging the actual data of course)
This will give us some fuel to figure out where priorities need to lie.
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@keithah - it seems to me that one of the issues of using telemetry metrics is that you will get statistics skewed to the majority of use cases. It seems evident that the majority of photos taken these days will originate on phones, and thus the only metadata that will be found will be geolocation (because few users bother, or know how, to turn this off) and Exif (technical) data. The descriptive metadata of IPTC will only exist in a small percentage of photos, and this will be entered only by those users who care about such things.
So if Plex is going to be driven by the majority of use cases, it seems unlikely that the situation will change. No-one would be more delighted than I if you say it will be otherwise, but looking at the example of Microsoftās use of telemetry data driving product development, Iāve only seen dumbing down of their products as a result. Their Photos app is a pale shadow of Windows Live Photo Gallery, which had support for tagging and used IPTC Core back in 2009. The Photos app, to this day, still does not support tagging. Itās a similar story with Groove, which is still far less capable than Microsoftās Windows Media Player.
If you want Plex to stand out from the crowd, then give it a decent USP in the Photos arena. For example, cousin Bill and his wife are coming to visit. If Plex knew about descriptive tagging using the IPTC Core standard, it would be a simple matter for me to treat them to a slideshow of that time we were all in Barcelona at that great restaurant, as a curtain-raiser to the latest Almodovar film.
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@gcoupe what restaurant? Iām in Barcelona right now. 
What I am trying to do is come up with a list of features we should have, and then figure out how much work they are to implement, and then figure out importance. IPTC is definitely on that list, but my gut feeling is manual tagging will come first, because then the foundation blocks of what we need for IPTC tagging should be there. Itās definitely not a āone or the otherā thing.
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@keithah said:
What I am trying to do is come up with a list of features we should have, and then figure out how much work they are to implement, and then figure out importance. IPTC is definitely on that list, but my gut feeling is manual tagging will come first, because then the foundation blocks of what we need for IPTC tagging should be there. Itās definitely not a āone or the otherā thing.
It seems to me that you have things back to front 
The foundation blocks of any descriptive tag metadata should be using XMP and the IPTC Core schema. The feature set for handling manual tagging that you expose in the clients should be using this foundation.
For more than ten years, Iāve used this groundrule for managing photo collections:
I insist that any software used in the digital workflow (transfer from camera to computer, image selection, digital processing, cataloguing, publishing and asset management) will respect any EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata that may be stored in the image file itself.
I am really not interested in asset management software that stores image metadata away in a proprietary format in the software itself. That way lies painting oneself into a corner down the roadā¦ However, I will happily accept asset management software that copies industry standard metadata from image files into its own database for performance reasons, so long as the database and the image files metadata content are kept in sync transparently (i.e. it takes little or no effort on my part).
The Plex ecosystem sits in the publishing and asset management roles of this digital workflow, and if it respected the foundation of the IPTC Core schema, it would save us the effort of having to tag our collections yet again in Plex.
TBH, I doubt whether I personally would want to use Plex for manual tagging, I use other tools for that, but having got the metadata into the image files, imagine how much easier it would be if Plex could simply read that XMP metadata out and use it for slicing and dicing the library to display my collection in any way I wish.
Please donāt reinvent the wheel. And I humbly submit that Plex developers should read the Metadata Working Groupās Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata - it may help them avoid mistakes that many have made before you.
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I insist that any software used in the digital workflow (transfer from camera to computer, image
selection, digital processing, cataloguing, publishing and asset management) will respect any
EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata that may be stored in the image file itself.
This is the goal, to respect the metadata that is there and import it. As you stated however, majority of photos donāt have tags, so manual editing is more important for the greater majority. I understand you would never use it, but we have to provide features that benefit the greatest amount of people first (which is what manual editing of tagging is) and then can work on the ability to bring tags in from things like IPTC.
Plex has traditionally had a rule to not edit/replace/modify any existing metadata. Something I would love to eventually see is the ability to opt in to an option to bring across existing tags as IPTC tags in the actual files. But we have many steps before this one, but I actually just talked to the PMS dev working on Photos and it should be technically feasibility.
Weāre on the same page, @gcoupe. What you want is exactly what I eventually want as well. How Plex might get there will be a longer route than you would like, but it is where I want to be. I know youāve been patiently waiting, and I canāt promise you anything will happen soon, but it is the direction we want to take Photos, so I ask please wait a little longer. I love the enthusiasm and knowledge and definitely will lean on you to understand the landscape further. Thanks!
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OK, thanks @keithah . That helps and clarifies matters. Also, many online services (e.g. Flickr, OneDrive, SmugMug) are already using IPTC Core/XMP under the covers, so anyone using these services is likely to be interested in Plex being able to import/use subsets of collections stored in the Cloud.
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+1 for that featuresā¦I am so desperately need it.
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@gcoupe Can you confirm if you export OneDrive, Flickr, etc photos, IPTC data is intact? I was told otherwise, but Iām hoping they were wrong.
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@keithah said:
@gcoupe Can you confirm if you export OneDrive, Flickr, etc photos, IPTC data is intact? I was told otherwise, but Iām hoping they were wrong.
@keithah - yes, Iāve just tested my albums on Flickr and OneDrive. In both cases, uploading photos will cause the service to read the metadata (Exif and XMP), display the resulting tags, and make the tags searchable online. Downloading a photo will result in a copy of the original, with all metadata preserved, being saved to the computer.
The OneDrive API provides a Search function that includes searching on the metadata.
The Flickr API has a similar capability.
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@keithah - Hereās an example; a photo downloaded from OneDrive, with the metadata contained in it being displayed (the panel on the right needed two screenshots to show it all)
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@gcoupe linked to a page at iptc.org that lists several applications that support IPTC, but it is by no means complete. These linux applications also support it:
darktable
photini
GIMP
exiv2
RawTherapee
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Just to clarify from my own experience and understanding having used many photo library management applications including Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Lightroom, Flickr, Apple Photos, Google Photos and more I tried out but canāt remember the names of, what @gcoupe says when he talks about painting yourself into a corner down the road is a very real and key factor for anyone who has maintained any sort of photo library on their computers. If the system that you have committed years to entering and maintaining keywords and tags in uses some central proprietary database or other proprietary method of storing that entered metadata then when you eventually have to move to another platform for whatever reason (maybe the software stopped being maintained, company folded, or upgrade price to the latest version which is the only one that will run on the current OSās just got too expensive) all of that work and metadata will be lost if you cannot export it by either embedding it in your photos or writing it to sidecar files in a standardised format.
Having had this happen on numerous occasions I can say that I have been extremely frustrated by this in the past and almost lost my enthusiasm for trying to manage and tag my photo libraries as a result. However having reaped the benefits of a well tagged and maintained library in the past, and currently enjoying this with my movies on Plex I truly hope that I can enjoy this once again. However I will not consider this as an actual feature of Plex worth engaging with until it can import my existing tags and export the new ones I add in it in industry standard IPTC & XMP formats. If Plexās policy is unwavering in not modifying original files then consider at least maintaining XMP sidecar files that can be maintained beside the pictures on the server non destructively and later travel with them should a user later decide to move them to another library application down the line. If their future software doesnāt support reading metadata from XMP sidecar files then Iām sure there will be tools out there to automatically read and embed it into the photos themselves before they import it if they need to. The main thing is that all their work organising their photos (which are arguably a much more emotionally significant and valuable personal thing than movie or music collections) is kept safe and accessible for the future.
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Metadata and keywords in photos are as important as for any other media, videos included. Imagine the Plex platform without movie descriptions or ratings, without cast details or release year. Imagine music without any of the tags that make finding any song, album or artist possible.
This shouldnāt be difficult in the slightest considering the long history Plex already has with metadata and database storage/manipulation of that data.
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Any update on reading tags in Plex? Thanks to @gcoupe for doing such a great job documenting out the struggles of tagging a ton of photos and then not being able to utilize that invaluable information. Thanks to @keithah for showing interest in bringing this functionality to Photos in Plex, hopefully itās garnered some attention with the devs so we can see it soon.
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Eagerly waiting for more updates from @keithah ā Thanks!
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Any news?
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