[Feature]: Discussion - Use tags in replacement (or additionally to) albums #1651
Replies: 18 comments 20 replies
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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 👍 |
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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 Love your thoughts! |
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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. |
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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. |
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Would love to see tags as well. |
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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. |
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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.) |
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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 Then searching with 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. |
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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 😃) |
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Pretty good idea, and if I would not be using DigiKam that could be my new workflow. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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? |
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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. |
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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 Sure, I could delete them, but I tend to keep my stuff so that they don't get resynced... |
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This is great, thank you. But can I have different categories / tags in archive to find photos i might need ( |
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Tags can replace albums so yes you could do that with tags if there was support for them. |
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So here is what I would use Tags for:
Workflow example:
Implementation details
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. |
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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! |
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@fivestones @bo0tzz |
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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. |
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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. |
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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:
Currently I have additionally:
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...
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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? |
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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Interesting point, i am doing quality rating using stars (do you do it different?) and it would be nice to have them, too. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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@honulii 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
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. |
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Ya, just an experience preference for me - I like both and I use them differently. |
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Currently search 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 |
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I would also love to have custom tags. I came from piwigo, which does support tags. |
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I have similar thoughts on using tags for categorization. I have several "categories" of images (and subcategories for each)
What i would like to use tags for
Searching capabilities:
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 |
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and others
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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
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