Does Immich pulltag info from sidecars?
Hi. First, praise: Immich looks gorgeous, seems very fast, and has a full feature set - and thank you for making FOSS that I can host myself!
Now, question: Does Immich read tag information from XMP sidecars? The documentation makes it sound like it does, but I imported ~50 images and videos, about half of which have sidecars, and the tags in those sidecars either didn't get picked up by Immich - or I don't know where to find it (I'm looking at an asset's "Info", but I'd also guess that if Immich picked up tags, there would be a "Tags" item in the menu or tags would be searchable). I ran the "Extract Metadata" (All and Missing) and "Sidecar Metadata" (Sync and Discover) jobs, but the tags were still not picked up.
The tags are in multiple formats, though not exif.
16 Replies
Yes if you use the CLI to upload the assets
Immich does support reading data from xmp files, but we only use a handful of values right now. Not all data from exif goes into the database and shows up in the ui
@Alex, I did use the CLI to upload the assets, from within the docker container that's running Immich. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place. If Immich imported my tags, where could I see them in the interface?
@jrasm91, based on the snip from one of my sidecar.xml files, would Immich read any of these tags?
No, we don't pull tags or description from exif currently.
What does "from exif" mean? I know exif is a tool to manage metadata, but my sidecars were created by Digikam, and looking at the tags it looks like none of them are "exif" (the sidecars do have many "exif" values like camera and lens, but none of the tags say "exif").
it means it pulls from the EXIF data get embedded in the photo/video
We use it generally for "image and video metadata", which can come from both the original file and xmp sidecar.
There are a bunch of support properties though, we are only saving a handful of them in the database for use right now.
We are using:
- ImageHeight
- ImageWidth
- ExposureTime
- FNumber
- FocalLength
etc.
ah i see. thanks for explaining. So any tags/faces/comments/ratings/etc that were added elsewhere are likely not part of Immich at the moment
Correct. We have plans to add support for more "exif tags" (properties/values) in the future.
For example, we could add a new database column "rating", save the value of
tags.Rating to the database, and then display it in the UI, etc. Right now we've started with the most common/consistent tags. There is a lot of inconsistency when it comes to these properties.if i add/name faces and define albums in Immich, does immich store that in the asset and/or in a sidecar, or only in Immich's database?
Only to local Immich database
we might integrate write those information to the sidecar file in the future
Right, there is a feature request to synchronize the metadata from immich back to a sidecar file.
sounds good
It is semi complicated to read additional things like description and support manually setting a description in the app. If you re-run metadata extraction does you custom description get overwritten by the one in the database, etc. Until we have writing it is tricky to manage reading data from exif that is also editable in the UI. After we support synchronizing I think it will be easier to support things like tags, description, etc. from exif.
thanks for the responses, @jrasm91 and @Alex