[Feature]: Discussion - Use tags in replacement (or additionally to) albums

[Tonux599]

Feature detail

I personally would be keen to see support for tagging photos. I like how digiKam does this, such that any single piece of media can have any number of tags applied to it.

How albums are currently implemented is close to this. Such that a single piece of media can belong to multiple albums. Notably however, what is absent, is no way of viewing media that is not assigned to album.

I feel tags can help resolve this. We could have a selection "No tags" to specifically view media that has not been tagged.

Furthermore, and arguably more important (although I like to tag all my media because I'm OCD), one thing albums lack is viewing more than a single album at the same time when the purpose requires.

For example, I could have an album Cat and an album Dog. It's clear which album to go to when I wish to browser either of them. But if I wanted to view "Cat and Dog" then I need to create a new album titled so and add the media to it.

Tags fix this, in that media tagged Cat, and media tagged Dog could both be browsed at the same time by selecting to view media tagged both Cat and Dog.

This is of course a personal preference. And if Immich has it's heart set on using Albums to conform to more mainstream applications, that is fine. However I hope I can spark a discussion on this, as it is something I would be very eager to see.

(n.b. GitHub requested I select which platform this applies to. It only lets me pick one so I have selected Web but it would apply to the mobile app and server too.)

Platform

Web

[bo0tzz]

The current object recognition functionality already applies tags to images at the moment. The intent is to expand that system in the future so tags are also used for marking eg recognised faces. I think adding support for user-added tags at that point is a logical step 👍

[palitu]

I agree (i use Digikam) and it essentially boils down to "logical albums".

The files are all sorted arbitrarily (ie i use YYYY/MM folders), then i use embedded tags within the photo to be able to create albums. It is the best way of having non-lock-in sorting of photos.

I would however mark all "auto-generated" tags under some sort of hierarchy (ie immich-ML/<tags>). This will allow us to clean up our photos if there are issues, and be able to distinguish between manual tags and immich tags.

Love your thoughts!

[nando2301]

A god idea is to have a "bookmark" icon over thumbnail to see if a photo or video is into album.

Like this:

Or a Unclassified album for default.

[AlmightyFrog]

The files are all sorted arbitrarily (ie i use YYYY/MM folders), then i use embedded tags within the photo to be able to create albums. It is the best way of having non-lock-in sorting of photos.

I use digikam exactly same way with the addition, that in also separate roughly the source (per Smartphone/camera).

In case Immich would try to support using multi-level tags like digikam does I'd bee more than happy to test and give feedback.
Digikam itself is not bad - it's just like it is not that multi user friendly...

[tbleiker]

Would love to see tags as well.

[spencerericfong]

To build on top of this, it would be great to be able to add location-specific tags to photos, which would be especially helpful to organize groups of related photos, some of which do have EXIF location data, and some of which do not.

[fivestones]

I think the CLIP-based search is great, but user-added tags, and the ability to filter the timeline view by certain tags (as mentioned at the beginning of this discussion: "dog & cat", or even "dog but not cat") is a different feature which is also important, beyond the CLIP search.

I may want to take a bunch of photos as "San Diego Trip" and may want to be able to view just these and then do a CLIP search that only searches within this set of photos.

Or even filter a view that has "San Diego Trip & (Dog but NOT cat)" and then do a CLIP search on those photos. (E.g., "people running on the beach at sunset" which would find me photos of my family running down the beach with our dog during our San Diego trip--but wouldn't show the ones were the cat is in the picture. It's a convoluted example but I think there are lots of real-life situations where I would use this kind of functionality.)

[aero31aero]

If Immich adds tags to the database, then a lot of this kind of filtering can also be done using the API. In the meantime, as a bad workaround, I've started adding #tags to the photo descriptions.

Then searching with m:#tag finds me those results. There's already a logical AND available; m:#dog m:#cat will get dog && cat, other operators need to be added later....

The main thing is that this system would be really trivial to migrate to real tags with a script if/when Immich starts supporting them.

[tbleiker]

I thought about this as well. However, one has to edit the description for each photo separately... (--> maybe, this is a feature request for bulk-editing of photo description 😃)

[AlmightyFrog]

Pretty good idea, and if I would not be using DigiKam that could be my new workflow.
Still one question: Do you also use ratings (0 to 5 stars) or favourites that way like? Favourites is easy, but for using stars you would need to filter like m:#1star m#2star separately...

[briandipalma]

I'm another Digikam tag user and I suggested hierarchical tags would allow the implementation of another popular request; nested albums. Currently I used Digikam to apply the tags to my pictures in the Immich library but it would be fantastic if I could just use Immich.

[charles-997]

I am so looking forward to immich supporting hierarchical tags + smart albums. I am also a DigiKam user. The combination of using DigiKam on the desktop and image on the web for viewing will be remarkable.

[ToxicFrog]

Same for me -- I'm a long-time Digikam user, and I'm looking at migrating to Immich (and giving the rest of my family accounts on it), but I also make heavy use of Digikam's heirarchical tags, and lack of support for them is the main thing keeping me from making the jump.

[Bakadori]

@briandipalma sorry for piggybacking here months later. Do you apply tags to the files in Immich's Upload Location, or are you using an External Library? I would love to be able to edit some files and manage tags externally (with DigiKam for example), but if I'm not wrong using the external library would mean adding an extra step for the backups, making it a bit harder to convince my partner to come to Immich.

[aisbergde]

both kind of tagging should be possible: embedded tags in images and tags in sidecar files. Sidecar files are supported also by immich, there is no need to distinguish.

[briandipalma]

I just apply the tags on the images in the Immich upload location. I think all Immich tracks are file paths so as long as they don't change it's fine.

[saibotma]

Great discussion here so far. I want to add that it would be great if tags could be shared with, e.g. family members. Then I could create multiple family wide tags (for different categories, events, vacations, etc.) and every family member could add a family shared tag to selected photos which he wants to share with the family.

I would love to start implementing this feature. Did someone already start working on it?

[briandipalma]

Nope. I'd probably start with parsing tags from picture metadata and showing it in the viewer Info section. At least that's where I'd have started. Then maybe a side menu option that showed all tags in the pictures.

[sandreas]

I would love to have the possibility to use Tags to hide elements... I've often use my phone to take ebay photos, but depending on how many I take, I would love to have a tag hidden and the ability to hide every photo with specific tags globally.

Sure, I could delete them, but I tend to keep my stuff so that they don't get resynced...

[sandreas]

This is the exact purpose of archive.

This is great, thank you. But can I have different categories / tags in archive to find photos i might need (ebay, grocery, garbage, github-issues, landlord) or is this [only] covered via albums?

[briandipalma]

Tags can replace albums so yes you could do that with tags if there was support for them.

[sandreas]

So here is what I would use Tags for:

• Tag single media files to have a filter option based on an autocomplete box with suggestions of already known tags
• Allow multi-word tags with spaces (My first day in the wild)
• Providing Search/Lookup to either HAVE or NOT HAVE specific filters (e.g. Peter, -Garbage, -Vacation)
• Adding tags based on folder structure while importing / adding external photos (e.g. /Peter/Vacation 2022/BBQ/001.jpg would have the tags Peter, Vacation, BBQ)
• Add a setting global default filters, where I could use Tags as a global default filter for hiding content (e.g. -Garbage -Archive)
• Ability to add an Icon to each Tag besides having a setting quick action tags to show extra buttons besides Archive and Favorite to either ADD (🗑️) or REMOVE (..🗑️..) the Tag, depending on its current state
• optional: Having an smart-tag feature based on AI algorithms to find similarities between already tagged images and untagged ones

Workflow example:

• Add a Tag grocery with the $ icon (optional: the smart-tag checkbox)
• Add a global filter -grocery
• Add a quick action for grocery to have a $ button
• Clicking on the $ button for every image that already is grocery
• Manual searching grocery tag to see if I accidentally tagged some images wrong - then clicking the ..$.. icon to remove the tag (instead of three clicks for Tags, then x for removing the tags, then blur the tags field)
• Optional: Click on a button find similar images via smart-tags will show similar untagged images based on the selected tag(s) - then you could mark multiple files and confirm with a single button

Implementation details

• add / modify a data structure Tags
• reference Tags to Photos via m:n
• add properties
  • id [int / guid] - tag id
  • value - [string,255], tag value (e.g. grocery)
  • icon - [string,255] - icon, I would use a short name for icons that are already available, e.g. trashcan or something - filled or striked for remove, outlined or solid for add
  • flags - [int] - to contain multiple flags / bit fields to be further extendable (e.g. usertag=1,quickaction=1,smarttag=1 => 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0111 - values could be UserTag = 1 << 0,QuickAction = 1 << 1, SmartTag = 1 << 2

Would be a lot of work, but I think this could be an awesome feature.

Just my 2 cents, hope this may inspire some other ideas.

[fivestones]

• Add a setting global default filters, where I could use Tags as a global default filter for hiding content (e.g. -Garbage -Archive)

• Ability to add an Icon to each Tag besides having a setting quick action tags to show extra buttons besides Archive and Favorite to either ADD or REMOVE the Tag, depending on its current state

Everything you wrote I like a lot, but these two in particular really resonate with me. I'd love to have any arbitrary group of photos with a button to see them (or not see them if the tag it's for is a negative tag), like favorites and archive are now.

And I'd really like to have global default tags. We basically already have this with a global default of "-archive". But to be able to customize this with any kind of tagging scheme would be great.

I feel like what you wrote about smart-tags showing possible additional photos based on what you've already tagged is the logical next step.

Such good ideas! Thanks for sharing!

[sandreas]

@fivestones @bo0tzz
Thanks. I added some implementation details on how I would implement it. The flags I added is pretty flexibile and this way you could extend an existing tags table / data structure without adding too many fields. Databases can usually operate on int fields using binary operators and having 32 flags for tags would make it a bit more future proof....

[steve5355]

I would love to use custom tags to help find and manage large libraries. example would be as I come across images that i need to go fix or want to edit, i could tag them "edit me" and then later, look at the tag and see all the images in one view, like a bookmark. This opens up a lot of possibilities for doing more advanced photo management with a simple logical tool. i would also expect there to be a url to find the tags like [domainname]/photos/tags/edit_me to show all the images with that tag. in the detail view, i would like to see the tags listed at the bottom with a ui to add / remove.

[aisbergde]

As long as these manually created tags are not supported by immich: Is there any similar software that can use tags created and managed with digiKam? digiKam works quite well on the PC, but only for one user. And I am looking for software that is as user-friendly as immich or Google Photos and especially allows sharing and collaborating on albums.

I installed immich today and the look and functionality are very good. However, digiKam is my primary management software and will remain so.

[AlmightyFrog]

I guess most people in this thread wants that, but it seems there is nothing.

Not what you asked for but maybe helps you for inspiration for workaround. My "old" solution is:

• Digikam single instance over RDP (docker running on homeserver*)
• Syncthing for syncing images bidirectional from Smartphones/PC to homeserver for Digikam
• Nextcloud for sharing Digikam exported images over the Internet

Currently I have additionally:

• Immich using digikam image folder as external storage for daily memories function, picture viewing/searching and endless scrolling

In future i might try the share with immich feature. Would be really nice to get rid of nextcloud for that and the exported files. But as long as there is no possibility to access them tags from digikam i won't invest time into that. Maybe it works with sidecars, i never checked that.

Having both immich and digikam of cause results in huge waste of cpu time and storage (e.g. thumbnails) but it is what it is...

• Zombie-Fork of good old linuxserver.io rdp container i have here on weekly build to keep getting updates. They sadly changed all to kasm and over web only but which not fits my needs...

[aisbergde]

Then I could focus on using immich and to enjoy the progress in features being added, instead of trying and evaluating other apps.

Synology Photo Station is not suitable, because they can't ignore folders starting with "." like ".dtrash".

OneDrive is even more problematic: I have big issues to synchronize meta data changes from my storage to OneDrive. OneDrive often reports false synchronization conflicts and creates multiple versions of my photos instead of just to accept my local changes. It looks like OneDrive is often not willing to accept embedded metadata changes.

I have seen in the demo of piwigo a hierarchical tag tree. But I did not yet evaluate, if this app could handle my existing folder structure and just work on top of it. Has someone piwigo experience and could shortly explain, why he uses immich but not piwigo?

[fivestones]

But I did not yet evaluate, if this app could handle my existing folder structure and just work on top of it. Has someone piwigo experience and could shortly explain, why he uses immich but not piwigo

I've used piwigo in the past, and yes, it can just handle your existing folder structure and work on top of it. If you just need a web view of the photos as they are in their folder structure, maybe piwigo is what you want. I didn't use tags with it, not sure if it has that functionality.

I use immich instead of piwigo now because it's so much better in lots of little ways. Sure, you don't get the structure of folders your photos are in, but really I'd rather have that managed by the software instead of by putting photos in folders (so I can do things like have a photo in multiple albums). And so many small quality of life things. Piwigo feels clunky and not smooth. Immich feels polished and is a pleasure to use. Then you add in things that immich has like machine learning giving you a real way to search photos, a map that shows all my photos and where they were taken, a timeline that has every photo on it, the ability to share photos with people, the fact that there is a native and well-working iPhone app, the way it automatically gathers photos from my phone a d adds them to the catalog, and on and on. There are just so many things that immich does, and it gets better every day. It also generally matches my vision for what I want in a photo program. So, those are some reasons I use immich instead of piwigo. Hope it helps!

[aisbergde]

After my first test of immich I even don't want to evaluate anything else. I am so impressed, how excellent and fast it works. Then I had a look into the release history, and I am so impressed, how many features have been implemented in such a short time. It looks like here we have very motivated developers. That's why I am optimistic, that we will get suggested features in immich and it is worth, to contribute at least bug reports and feature ideas.

I am not a TypeScript developer, so I can't contribute TypeScript code. I am more a database expert, not yet on PostgreSQL, but anyway I want to extend my horizon. Maybe there could be fields to contribute.

[cejote]

I would really love to see a tagging feature being implemented. In addition to the workflow examples given above, tags are a great way to store quality ratings to flag the best image in a series of photos.

[AlmightyFrog]

Interesting point, i am doing quality rating using stars (do you do it different?) and it would be nice to have them, too.

[cejote]

In digikam, I like putting stars and also use the quality sorter to add color flags. However, in case I have 10 photos taken in burst mode that are rated with 5 stars, only one is my top candidate that gets streamed to the picture frame. I think all this functionality can be implemented by setting tags.

[frejaya]

Personally I really want tags, but I don't want them to replace albums. I want both tags and albums. I see albums as the digital equivalent as my physical photo albums or as a contained way of collecting photos that belong together and easily sharing them or reminiscing. I see tags as a tool for more granular navigation, search, additional layers of information. I would use an album to collect photos from a specific person's graduation in a specific year for example. But I would use tags for the name of a pet, especially given no pet recognition feature. I could use an album for pets but it doesn't make as much sense to me because they would be scattered across years and places and don't have a clear commonality. The tag is fine for that. I would also use tags for things like park names, bird common names (birdwatching hobby). I wouldn't want these in albums because they would be huge unhelpful albums.

[mirisbowring]

But albums are just tags as you just mentioned. It groups media by a specific identifier.

Basically you would "mark" a tag as album so it can be displayed under albums. Else, there is no difference

[sandreas]

@honulii
@mirisbowring
I think both of you got a point here. Albums are mainly a UI thing to group a specific set of photos.

In UI, Tags are different from Albums, because the visual appearance is different.

To keep Albums in the UI while getting rid of the albums data structure in the backend, all it would take is

• A tag with a type property (type:album)
• A UI redesign to handle this type as Album
• A migration script converting all albums into tags type:album and deleting albums afterwards

The thing is: This migration is probably a bad idea in terms of compatibility and maintenance. Why not just keep everthing as is and simply add tags, so you could easily go back a version and no migration would be required.

I would go with an addition of tags with a type field backed by an enum(int), where everything < 100000 is an auto assigned tag (e.g. object detection, portrait, camera name, upload or whatever) and everything >= 100000 is a custom tag, like Vacation, family etc.

This way it would be easy to remove / reassign automatic tags.

[frejaya]

Ya, just an experience preference for me - I like both and I use them differently.

[thanosapollo]

Currently search m:#TAG would provide me with content that does not include #TAG in the description, which is confusing.

I'm using immich to organize photos & videos taken from my classes, for example, when having a couple photos taken in my pathology classes on carcinomas, I would like to be able to specify a tag #carcinoma #adenocarcinoma on a photo and be able to search for those tags later.

[quitchat]

I would also love to have custom tags. I came from piwigo, which does support tags.
I like to do plane spotting, and I have a ton of plane pictures I took over the years. I have an album called "Plane Spotting", where I display all plane photos. I would like to use tags to group the planes by models (eg. b747, b757, b767, b777, a330, a340, etc). I also tag the planes by their respective carrier (eg, UA, Delta, American, Alaska, etc). So each plane photo may have multiple tags (eg b777, UA).

[Lightfire228]

I have similar thoughts on using tags for categorization.

I have several "categories" of images (and subcategories for each)

• general pictures of people, pets, memories, etc
• pictures of medical maladies (both myself and my pets)
• memes, NSFW memes,
• reference images / notes / reminders

What i would like to use tags for

• whitelist / blacklist tags from the Photos / Timeline page
  • I would like to avoid accidentally showing pictures of my crotch or likewise to my family, say, if i hand my phone to them
  • Or similarly avoiding awkward "shoulder surfing" situations at work if i happen to have Immich open
• tag each pet individually, for each photo
  • I currently have 5 "Pets/Pet Name" albums, and using albums for this is a UX pain (especially since albums only offer 1 level of categorization)
• auto add certain tags to albums
  • ex. a "Pets" album that automatically includes tags for each pet ("Zuko", "Azula", etc)
• manually add all images with a tag to an album
  • ex. search through my inbox, find all new memes and tag them, then add them to a meme album
  • this is distinct from the point above, and while the auto-tag-album feature would take care of my usecases, i could see it being a useful feature for mass-categorization
• auto tag new images with "Inbox" to be tagged and sorted later
• certain "meta" tags
  • "NSFW" or "Hidden" that automatically exclude images from being shown anywhere, unless explicitly toggled
  • (there could be other uses for this, like the "Inbox" tag mentioned above)

Searching capabilities:

• basically everything @sandreas mentioned.
• the ability to include or exclude tags from the search, or only search within specific tags

---

In general, features for bulk image categorization would be really useful. I have about 3.2k photos (which is not much comparatively), but initially, i had zero albums or categorization at all. Going through each one, and manually assigning albums one-by-one takes forever, is error prone, and is just annoying to do

[justin-pierce]

Tags also open up (in a cleaner way than albums) additional functionality.

Like I'd eventually like to build a feature or companion app to help clean up my library that would show me images without a 'keep' tag, then have a simple swipe left/right (or <- -> on kb) to either trash or tag as 'keep'.

[aero31aero]

Or a combination. You can write your own tool that keeps a list of your trips like:

name: Paris Trip
date_start: 2024-03-12
date_end: 2024-03-20
cameras-involved: pixel-6, canon-eos-600d, iphone-14

And then this corresponds to a Paris Trip tag in your library.

Now, if guests come over and you have a comprehensive tagging system already going, you could quickly make a smart album like:

has-tag "Paris Trip" && had-tag "for-guests" && has-tag "high-quality" (presumably from some AI feature that could be added via API again).

And bam, instead of making guests sit through 1000 photos of your paris trip, this immediately trims it down to 50ish.

---

For me, whether the tags are stored as sidecars, or in the database, or in EXIF is an implementation detail. I'm going all in on using Immich server and API as the source of truth for my data.

[Godd67]

Tags are great and they have many uses. My personal use case - additional grouping within an album-
Lets say, I had a vacation in Europe, have tons of pictures and to share them, created a single album Europe24. But my tour included multiple cities and I want people with whom I shared my album, be aware of that and be able to filter only Paris, for instance. I do not want to create multiple albums, I'm lazy and I want to spend as less time as I can to organize my photos. But I also do not want to answer tons of similar questions in what city this picture was taken or how can I see only Barcelona views. Tags will be ideal for this - I would still have one album, mass update Barcelona photos with "Barcelona" tag and that's it.
Another solution would be to have hierarchical/nested albums but tags are way more elegant.

[aero31aero]

Arguably, your feature request is easily doable by some kind of clustering on the geolocation data as well. So, if we get a tags feature, we can make Immich or some other script that uses the Immich API, to simply create tags based on city names found in the geolocation.

Yay for more laziness and automation.

[codihuston]

I am also very interested in this feature and potentially contributing. Tags could make things incredibly flexible for all of the reasons above. Does anyone know what kind of limitations or existing design choices in immich would make implementing tags a difficult thing to do?

[aisbergde]

And I think, it makes sense: if you look at the assets as primary storage and the database as secondary storage. I use only immich external libraries, and immich is one possible viewer for assets. If it will be possible to enrich asset in immich, I would like to store the meta data in any way in the assets.

But I agree, it is not required in real time. A way to update assets or sidecar file in near time or explicitly on demand (export whatever from immich database into the assets) would be enough. And maybe this was your idea? Keep data in the database and update assets later or on demand?

[briandipalma]

Of course it makes sense. If your database is lost or corrupted you don't lose all the tagging work you've done for example. The DB should just be a reflection of the metadata in the files. We don't want another Gphotos.

[diggit]

Yeah, I forgot about external libraries.

For internal library, I'd avoid any writes to files. Then it can be for example on SMR drives without downsides.

If your database is lost or corrupted...

Well, you are doing DB backup at least before each immich upgrade, possibly more often, so you are covered here. (or not?)

If I tag 1k images, I really don't want to modify 1k files in the storage. When I rename tag used by several thousands of images I really don't want to modify all of them in storage. It is one transaction in DB...

If immich could optionally (opt in) reflect metada from DB into image files, then it would be fine by me.

[aisbergde]

it should be optional, of course. Nobody should be forced to store metadata in files.
If someone is happy to depend on a database solution, fine. I am a big fan of databases. And database migrations are part of my business.

On the other hand, I have seen so many products coming and going, with proprietary storage solutions. I loved Picasa.

It's not only about my photos. It's also about written content. File formats, which I used 30 years ago, are died. Now I prefer plain text formats and markup languages like AsciiDoc or Markdown.

Video content I stored in DVD formats, which have been very popular 20 years ago, and now it's hard to extract the videos. But all information, which was stored directly in photo files as EXIF, is still available :-)

[briandipalma]

Yeah I have zero interest in spending any time creating albums in Immich because they're not easily portable. Same with tags if they take the same approach. I'll keep using Digikam. I'm not backing up my Immich database because I put nothing in it that I care too much about. I want everything to be simple text configuration files and databases that are nothing more than a reflection of the files the application is asked to scan. I won't put considerable time into anything that's not trivial to port. Imagine I want to test another project. All my hard work sorting tens of thousands of pictures will not be reflected. No way, I'm not doing that, I think you'd be foolish to ask for anything else.

[sandreas]

Clearly this feature is going to be realized somehow in the future. Since people are often asking what is holding off the immich team implementing this, may I suggest to collect all the very useful information in here in form of a checklist (e.g. in a final Feature Request)? Example:

• Create Database entity tags
• Differentiate between automatically added tags and custom user tags
• Add a setting to enable storing tags back to files
• ...

Scope of the checklist may be user storie titles (better understandable for non developers) or even broken down to tasks (for developers working on pull requests). That would make it a lot easier to keep track of the planned feature and implementation details for supporters AND users waiting on the feature.

[diggit]

Good idea!

Could be obvious, but "write comex queries like cat, -dog, outside" is also important.
This feature is already missing for albums (which would then behave the same way as tags).

[sandreas]

Good idea!

Could be obvious, but "write comex queries like cat, -dog, outside" is also important.
This feature is already missing for albums (which would then behave the same way as tags).

Well, this was not meant to already BE that checklist, but only an example... I think this should be held by the maintainers

[briandipalma]

What are automatically added tags? I don't think there should be anything like such a thing tbh.

[sandreas]

@briandipalma
Well, as I already mentioned here, it seems that I should go a bit more into detail... automatically added tags could be:

• Suggested but inactive ones: User tags many pictures, AI scans the library and finds "similar" pictures, UI is extended to confirm AI detections
• Bulk-Action auto tags: User imports images from a folder and the folder structure gets represented in tags (vacation 2020/Iceland/Best Shots will result in Tags vacation, 2020, Iceland and Best Shots)

One problem with "suggested" tags is, that they may pollute the library unless cleaned up. So there must be a mark, that an AI run has suggested tags and if the same AI runs again, the previous suggestions must be removed, because they may be invalid due to a better algorithm, a new model, etc.

I'll try to structure my ideas about this feature and post a Roadmap I would suggest to get this going, if this is something the project would benefit of. Would you be interested?

[briandipalma]

I think such tags should be internal and only user tags should ever be shown. The tags you have mentioned are implicit in the file metadata (location, dates) and any decent search should already take such things into account.

[AlmightyFrog]

What are automatically added tags? I don't think there should be anything like such a thing tbh.

Let's say it like following:
I am not sure if the best solution would be a automatically added tag. I use immich pretty much as nice Photo Viewer with benefits like search for people.
Had to learn the hard way, that when you move your files on hard disk (at least in external library mode) the detected persons get lost. I have not yet retagged all of them. Not sure if I want to spend that effort again.

That is why i do not like databases; pretty sure the information is still there, but not for average guy recoverable.
But if there would have been added a automatic tag into EXIF, i guess recovering would have been easier at least for general search.

Also if that person data would be in exif, i could use the tags also back in digikam.

[aisbergde]

it is important to not reinventing the wheel. There are existing metadata and tagging systems and there is great software to handle tags and metadata. For example digiKam.

immich import and export of metadata just should work. Of course immich will not import / export / use all metadata, but it could extend the subset of used metadata.

How to use tags is another question. It should not depend on the import / export feature. Usage of tags can be changed and can be extended.

[briandipalma]

Yes, if we could just copy what digiKam does that would be great. User created tags, with hierarchical tag support, read from and written to the metadata of the picture files. digiKam writes tags into multiple metadata slots to support various programs. I wouldn't consider AI and other features for the initial implementation.

[sandreas]

I wouldn't consider AI and other features for the initial implementation.

@briandipalma
I wouldn't consider hierarchical tag support either, but start with the bare minimum, I described above.

2 Tables (Tags and ImageTags), just assigning Tags to Images with m:n relationship. That's it. What I think would be important, is the TagSource to structure the workflow, but this also is optional for the first implementation.

[briandipalma]

Hierarchical tag support is just tags with / being a special character when displaying the tags. The tag is still stored as a single value.

[AlmightyFrog]

Yes, if we could just copy what digiKam does that would be great.

I am no native english speaker so i might say this not in a sensible way, but there is nothing bad meant in following statements:

My wild guess is, immich and digikam are too different applications seemingly focused for the "google photos" crowd.
where it is about cool features, instant image viewing and sharing.

whereas digikam is more about the semi professional way of tagging, sorting and archiving a huge library.

To be honest, only functional thing i am missing on immich to turn my back on digikam functional wise is missing tag support.

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TLDR: Of cause we can hope for tags and even hierarchical tags support to come, but i guess that would be a long wait if it comes at all...

[ThePrivacyPlayer]

I've just discovered this app thanks to FUTO, and unfortunately not having user tags is a dealbreaker for me, since I want to switch to more robust way of handling my photos than what I've done so far, which requires tags in my case. Too bad, as this project seems to be one of the best.

I might be looking into Digikam then in the meantime, until the feature is added.

Keep up the good work guys, it looks really awesome and I hope to be able to come back to this soon!

[briandipalma]

I use both of them together, digiKam to add the tags. Immich for everything else, just point digiKam to the Immich library.

[AlmightyFrog]

Just to get it right, you use Immich for sync and everything not using the external libraries feature?

How does Immich behave, when you alter files in digikam or even move them?

I am using it the other way round (syncthing for files, digikam for tags, immich only as viewer) and immich has quite some issues when files are altered/removed: In best case a rescan/migrate fixes it, in worst case all e,g, detected faces are lost and all the thumbs and so on also have to be regenerated.