Feature request: Option to add Tags

[peros550]

Instead of moving files into album folders, it could be an option leave fil intact and just add a tag related to the album's name.

[mrsilver76]

Assuming that people might want to tag and copy/move/link their content, I think I'm going to need to add some kind of --tag argument which means that you don't have to use --copy, --move or --link. That way you could do --tag on it's own (to do nothing with the files but tag them) but also --copy --tag to both copy and tag.

Am I right in thinking that you want to add the album name to the EXIF:XPKeywords, IPTC:Keywords and XMP:Subject fields?

If so, I would need to replace commas with something else. For example: "Paris, Le Marais, and Versailles" would need to become (say) "Paris_Le Marais and Versailles_".

To try, download ExifTool and then use exiftool -keywords="Some title" file.jpg, upload that to Synology Photos and let me know if the content is tagged as you would like.

[peros550]

I went to Synology photos web UI, set two different tags as listed below:

and then downloaded the photo and opened it in exiftool. Here are the tags :

and

so they are stored in two places within exif metadata.

[mrsilver76]

The downside is that the library I use is for reading metadata only, so I'd need to find one that writes metadata and integrate that. Xmpcore looks to be a candidate but I need to play with it a bit more and see how it impacts the size of the resulting binary.

On that basis, it might be a short while before I can come back to you.

As an interim solution, I can provide a Powershell script which you can run with:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File Apply_Tags.ps1 <name of folder>

and it'll tag every single jpg, jpeg, mp4, mkv and avi file in that folder (and all sub-folders) with the name of the parent folder (minus a comma, as that is not a valid character).

If that's of interest to you, then save this as Apply_Tags.ps1:

# Show usage and exit if no arguments or help requested
if ($args.Count -eq 0 -or $args[0] -in @("-h","--help","/?")) {
    Write-Output "Usage"
    Write-Output "  Apply_Tags.ps1 <path to folder>"
    Write-Output ""
    Write-Output "Description"
    Write-Output "  Applies the folder name (with commas replaced by underscores)"
    Write-Output "  as a keyword tag to jpg, jpeg, mp4, mkv and avi files."
    exit 0
}

# Use the first argument as folder path
$FolderPath = $args[0]

# Check folder exists
if (-not (Test-Path $FolderPath)) {
    Write-Error "Folder path does not exist: $FolderPath"
    exit 1
}

# Supported file extensions
$Extensions = "*.jpg","*.jpeg","*.mp4","*.mkv","*.avi"

# Get all matching files recursively
$Files = Get-ChildItem -Path $FolderPath -Recurse -Include $Extensions -File

if ($Files.Count -eq 0) {
    Write-Output "No supported files found in $FolderPath"
    exit 0
}

# Apply the tag using ExifTool
foreach ($File in $Files) {
    # Get the folder name of the file itself
    $FileFolderName = Split-Path $File.DirectoryName -Leaf
    # Replace commas with underscores
    $SanitizedTag = $FileFolderName -replace ',', '_'
    
    Write-Output "Tagging $($File.FullName) with '$SanitizedTag'"
    & exiftool -overwrite_original -keywords="$SanitizedTag" $File.FullName
}

Write-Output "Done. Tagged $($Files.Count) files."

The downside of this approach is that you'll need to get GroupMachine to reorder your files into folders first before you tag and then upload - however if you run GroupMachine using -l (--link) then you won't be wasting any disk space.

So you can run once, upload to Synology and then delete the files.