Feature Request: Manual Tagging

General Discussions Plex Features
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Manual Tagging has been a commonly request feature, and I’d love to get opinions on how we should support this!

Do you want ability to add/edit/delete your auto tags? On Web and Mobile, or TV connected devices too, without a physical keyboard?

Unfortunately, importing tags from other services such as Flickr, Google Photos, or iCloud isn’t something most of them allow…

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Automatic import of embedded tags/keywords would be best or are you saying that this is not possible for some reason? Some discussion here: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/182447/keywords-for-photos#latest

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Oh, and an additional word on the automatic tagging service. I don’t use it, and don’t want to use it. Such a service has been available in OneDrive for a long while now, and I very quickly turned it off. I have my own controlled vocabulary of (hierarchical) keywords, and this is much more useful in handling my 65,000 photos than a simplistic automatic tagging service.

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If this feature is implemented, please remove the feature of searching file name. Searching tags is way more useful.
Other than that, please let us tag a folder(album). Then, we can use it for something like comics.

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There are three metadata standards for images, EXIF, IPTC, and XMP (I believe XMP can either be embedded or in a sidecar file. Plex should support both.). In the same way that Plex has a ‘use embedded tags’ feature for music, a Plex user should be able to:

  • Configure photo libraries to prefer local (EXIF, IPTC, and XMP) metadata, importing that data into Plex’s database when file scanning occurs. If auto-tagging is enabled, autotagging occurs only when no embedded tags are present (or, autotags are applied in addition to manually configured tags).
    ** Where the EXIF, IPTC, and XMP tags overlap, Plex should decide on an order of precedence (if one is not specified by the standards themselves).
  • Edit at least the most important tags (which should be discussed separately) in Plex’s database, but, just as with other media, Plex should never modify my original files.
  • Edit and delete tags created via autotagging, and lock those edits (just like the orange Lock icon on music metadata fields), so future autotagging passes will not overwrite them (this will allow me to get the “broccoli” autotags off my waterfalls).
  • Refresh photo metadata after editing embedded tags externally (via Photini, ACDSee, Photoshop, etc.). This feature should must NOT suffer the troubles that exist in Music and Movie libraries which make the Plex Dance necessary.

In short, Plex should treat photo metadata in much the same way it treats music and movie metadata (without the Plex Dance bugs).

I would prefer that, like music and video libraries, tag editing functions are a server-only function, accessible to the server owner only. If client-side tagging is allowed (so each user can create personalized tags) they should be held separate from, and never overwrite or mingle with, the server-based tags.

I disagree with the request to remove the ability to search by filename. Add searching by tags in addition to search by filename, but sometimes filename search is useful.

2 Likes
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@gcoupe said:
I have my own controlled vocabulary of (hierarchical) keywords, and this is much more useful in handling my 65,000 photos than a simplistic automatic tagging service.

If your vocabulary is easily explainable, I would be interested in seeing it, and possibly applying it. It seems to me that a structured vocabulary would be a very useful thing, but I’m having trouble getting started.

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@beckfield said:

@gcoupe said:
I have my own controlled vocabulary of (hierarchical) keywords, and this is much more useful in handling my 65,000 photos than a simplistic automatic tagging service.
If your vocabulary is easily explainable, I would be interested in seeing it, and possibly applying it. It seems to me that a structured vocabulary would be a very useful thing, but I’m having trouble getting started.

I did a blog post some years back that covered how I tag my photos, and what I based my controlled vocabulary on. Hope this gives you some ideas to get started with.

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Thanks. I’ll take a look.

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@keithah said:
Manual Tagging has been a commonly request feature, and I’d love to get opinions on how we should support this!

Do you want ability to add/edit/delete your auto tags? On Web and Mobile, or TV connected devices too, without a physical keyboard?

Unfortunately, importing tags from other services such as Flickr, Google Photos, or iCloud isn’t something most of them allow…

For me, adding/editing/deleting the auto tags would be great. I’m not as concerned about Mobile and TV Connected devices, but I am sure there may be some people who are. I would think keyboard devices would be easiest so maybe if it could be added to Plex Web first at least, that would be really useful.

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I prefer tagging photos using EXIF info. I would do it with a physical keyboard. I don’t use the auto tags.

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@keithah said:
Manual Tagging has been a commonly request feature, and I’d love to get opinions on how we should support this!

Do you want ability to add/edit/delete your auto tags? On Web and Mobile, or TV connected devices too, without a physical keyboard?

Unfortunately, importing tags from other services such as Flickr, Google Photos, or iCloud isn’t something most of them allow…

Manual tagging will be great! As Plex has already implemented some machine-learning/auto-tagging, I really hope we’re on our way to facial recognition as well.
Things I would love to see soon with photo tagging:

  1. The ability to manually tag photos by selecting a region to tag a specific area. This way, we can manually tag people and objects of interest.
  2. Web, Mobile, and Desktop App support for manual tagging (TV would be interesting but maybe not as practical, IMO)
  3. Automatic Facial Recognition - When adding photos, having the option to scan for faces would be great! After tagging specific people (or even objects), it would be very useful to have images with similar attributes show up in a list where we can select/deselect to include/exclude them.
  4. Having the ability to search for people or objects would be great and we’re already part of the way there (which is awesome). For example, if Jim wants to see pictures of him and his kids, he should be able to tag everyone (or have them auto-tagged), then search something like, “Jim, Kate, Dan” to filter down to anything that is tagged as such.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts on the photo-tagging setup… hopefully others agree, I’d love to see these features!
Thanks for the thread.

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Manual tagging please

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I am disapointed that Plex can’t read my RDF/XMP tags and has no problem reading other tags.

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If you want to improve photo tagging in Plex, please also support this feature request:

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Manual tagging for photos and videos seems like a basic feature to me although I appreciate that a lot is involved to implement it well.
I would be happy with tags being global rather than private per user. Features I feel are worth expecting (although I’m no expert) are:

  1. Ability to unlock tagging of photos and videos so that tags can be added / auto-tags can be edited/deleted, per photo/video).
  2. Ability to create and edit your own structured list of tags (per server, as admin of that server)
  3. Ability to set tagging permissions per user (managed users and/or friends) - example permissions could be: user can tag: yes/no; user must use structured list of tags: yes/no (no means they can add their own tags instead of only tags from the list)
  4. Tags associate items together. So do albums. I suggested that tags are global / visible across all users - so if one user creates an album, that album should be visible to all other users/friends who have access to its parent library. This could be a default setting but the option to share/restrict user access per album would also be a welcome addition (like a subset of the already existing per-user library access). I know there are use-cases for private albums but come on, most people create albums in order to then share them.
  5. Upgrade albums to display a cover photo (with the title also in a prominent position) and allow this cover photo to be selected manually by the album creator.
  6. Import photos and their existing tags from other photo services (if this is feasible / if there is a common standard for this)

This all stems, personally, from a need to be able to share a specific selection of photos/videos with other managed users of the same library.

Thoughts?

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+1 for Manual Tagging or reading existing tags!

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Yes, would love to be able to edit photos manually - the imaggr one isn’t great as the AI pick up things that are not (eg a childs spotty blanket is tagged as “dog” …). Need to able to have custom tags eg people=John Smith, Paul Jones, Albert Brown, Mum and Dad. The searching for all pictures of “mum” gets that one …

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would make it worth worth using if i could delete or remove existing auto tags and make a list of my own to use.
would even pay more for this feature as now photos are semi worthless without this mechanism. (bought pass thinking i could edit or create my own, should have read the fin print)

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YES PLEASE! This would be incredible!! I’m surprised it wasn’t done before the auto tagging… As a photographer this would be an incredible feature to have.

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So I see now with the version 1.11.3.4803 of PMS, I have a new “Tags” tab when I edit a photo, showing what appears to be fields for manual tags, as well as the autotags (if turned on). Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be importing the EXIF tags that are on the source image, but with the field at least there, has anyone attempted to script a way to pull the EXIF and place tags in the tags field? Seems like there’s hope!