Being a plex pass owner for a long time, I came here only after 2-3 years to check if Plex has started supporting them now? As expected, not yet 
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Might be trickier from Lightroom, does it embed the tags in the file metadata or use sidecar files?
It uses sidecar files.
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Photo library needs so much love. This is a major functional gap.
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Plex not being able to even read a normal standard like EXIF comments or metadata is incredibly disappointing. I made the mistake of buying lifetime plex pass before checking for such a standard feature. This makes the photo library functionality of Plex basically useless. Please add this basic functionality that every other product including many open source products already supports!
I cannot and will not recommend Plex to anyone until this functionality is added. Having to run two different media servers to get basic EXIF functionality is ridiculous!
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Voted.
Yes, I’m a Shotwell user on Ubuntu with lots of tagging, hoping to move to Plex so I have all my tags, albums, events etc on all my devices rather than just my main computer, but it looks like that is some distance away.
I think XMP sidecars are the nicest mix of reading/updating something on the hard drive (so that it is portable and with the files in case of database corruption) and preserving the original files as they were (useful for many reasons including duplicate detection), but obviously you also need to read the exif tags etc in the files too.
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I found a possible workaround. If you are using a Mac, theres an app called “A Better Finder Rename”. Its possible to batch rename your images to include the keywords at the end of the filename. That should then be searchable within Plex.
Agreed. This would be extremely helpful. It is surprising that this isn’t included. It would improve the functionality especially when exporting from applications like Lightroom.
I agree with so many others here, that EXIF is a standard that needs to be embraced by Plex, as it is with many well known tools. Interestingly, Jellyfin one-ups Plex by showing EXIF in the metadata, and allowing it to be edited. The thing both Plex and Jellyfin are missing, is to display the EXIF comment (even if optionally) as people browse the photo collection.
I would prefer to display the EXIF data on the page in plain view, so it appears in slideshows, and not just when a mouse hovers over it. Perhaps a plugin could be developed.
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I just came across this tagging thread myself, as I saw the option to add them in the UI just now.
I’d agree that the current tagging functionality has no real utility - or worse than none, if you invest any time in using it. Photos need data and tags that travel with the file rather than being locked into a particular application database.
I’d love to learn if anyone finds the auto-tagging useful. I tried it myself once, and for me the concept seems entirely foreign to the core use case of photo management. We don’t go to our photo collection to look for “banana” or “dog” or “mountain”. Maybe to a clipart bureau, but not to your personal photo collection. I go to my photo collection to look for “that funny movie I made of the kids last summer on holiday”. I generally find location, face and calendar to be the best way of finding that photo you were looking for, as well as event name, where it’s supported.
As for the manual tagging: In just the last ten years, my photo database has been through: simple file storage, Google Photos, Picasa, Picturelife, StreamNation, Smugmug, Apple Photos, and now Mylio. If you think about the longevity and significance of a photo, the idea that you’d lose all the metadata when you move platform (and half of those apps shut down/went bankrupt), then any app that doesn’t store and read the metadata in the photo in EXIF or ITPC/XMP is really doing you a disservice.
I actually chose Picturelife, and then Mylio, largely because they wrote tags back to the photos (as well as face tags, etc), and did not try to force a platform lock-in. Picturelife was by far the best photo management app I ever used, but with its demise, I can use Mylio to organise and manage my photos, and am now using Plex to share selected subsets with friends and family privately. It’s not perfect, but given my photo master copies are on my NAS anyway, and I use Plex for movies, the photo sharing is convenient and does the job.
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I think the option for plugins is long gone
I had not heard of Mylio, how have you found it?
Until about a year ago I had been using OneDrive for tagging and it worked well, was easy to sort and find photos. Then, with no warning they removed tagging support, plenty of complaints and a year later it’s still not back. I needed something that did not tie me to a subscription, bye bye Adobe, and as it’s something I do occasionally and not as an occupation I didn’t want to spend much. And any product that either could not read my existing EXIF tags and write back to those was immediately out of the running. Plex auto tagging is terrible and after a bit of hunting I learnt about DigiKam, it’s opensource seems well supported, can read and write EXIF and has full tag support. Any tags I had were read and any editing I do is sync’d back to the file which even appears in Windows File Explorer meaning that almost anything can search through. As a personal preference the UI of Digikam is poor, the software is robust but not a nice place to be.
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I’ve been tracking photo management apps since I had an iPhone. It’s just something I want to get right.
Mylio is still a bit complex, but I need it to have all the features for adjusting dates, etc whilst still browsing easily, so it’s the best option for that. The important thing is having access to your photos anywhere, and being able to find the one you’re talking about with someone before they get bored and walk off, hence good tag/folder management.
Picturelife was just perfect, especially in sharing selected albums to others, but perfect does not mean commercially viable. The ex-founder now leads Amazon photos, so I guess he knew what he was doing.
I’ll check out Digikam - at least the open source stuff tends to last more than the 2-3 year lifespan startups. There’s no money in photo management (Mylio and Smugmug appeal to pro photographers to get their monthly subs), so I can understand Plex not leading with it, but… come on, just read/write metadata EXIF/XMP 
D
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Hi, how can you do that in docker (docker app on Synology GUI) ? the script files are some kind of virtual FS, and I can’t seem to be able to “mount” pptag.py to the container itself… Help appreciated, thanks !
@EEDacho, @andreasrehbein in config.py I don’t quite understand
path of the photo library in plex (absolute path)
PHOTOS_LIBRARY_PATH_PLEX = ‘/<some path/’
Paths in plex are not unix paths, are they ? My library is called “Photos”.
So I wrote “/Photos/” and moved on, but it doesn’t work.
On a related note, How can I use a subset of my library for testing purposes ? (i.e. “/Photos/foo/bar/”)
Thanks for the good work !
Hi @Walfroy,
the PHOTOS_LIBRARY_PATH_PLEX is the path that you have set in the plex instance for your library. If you are not sure about this path just look it up in your plex server instance. The path is found under when you enter the settings for your library under the folder options for the photos library.
A subset of the library can not be used. The only way to that is to add a new library in plex and only use one dedicated folder.
Adding my vote and comment to this. I just started using Plex and this thread is making me wonder if I made a bad choice. This seems like a basic feature that should have either been there from the get-go or early on. But here it is in a 5-year-old RFE with AFAICT no action by Plex. I can’t imagine ignoring an issue like this for 5 years. That’s a bad sign and makes me wonder if I need to look at other solutions.
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It looks like some have been doing a good deal of work to get this working. I will be looking back at this when I am further along with my tagging. Plex, please take another look at this. I have been starting to tag my photos in the file system. I really would like to take advantage of that work in Plex. Only seems appropriate to do this given tagging of photos in Plex is supported. Would be very appreciated by many given this topic goes back 4 years and is active. Thank you.
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This script has been working great, however i just started getting these errors
File “D:\Tools\Metadata Script\PPTagv3\ppTag-master\pptag.py”, line 418, in
fetchPhotosAndProcess()
File “D:\Tools\Metadata Script\PPTagv3\ppTag-master\pptag.py”, line 242, in fetchPhotosAndProcess
loopThroughAllPhotos()
File “D:\Tools\Metadata Script\PPTagv3\ppTag-master\pptag.py”, line 335, in loopThroughAllPhotos
elements = container[“Metadata”]
KeyError: ‘Metadata’
Any idea ? thanks in advance.
Please enable feature or filters to use embedded tags on personal photos and videos
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