Writing tags and other metadata into original files and/or sidecar files.

[relink2013]

I was really excited to start migrating over to Lychee, but now that I have it installed and running I am finding no way to write metadata changes back to the actual files.

When I was first looking into Lychee I came across this plugin which sounded perfect. However I didnt think to check the date of the last update for it, plus I cannot find any info on how to install plugins at all in the latest version of Lychee.

Having tags written into the orginal files, or at-least a sidecar is critical for me. This is the single biggest issue I have had finding a photo manager/gallery.

[kamil4]

Please check a related discussion in issue #1096.

I understand the underlying problem and I too would like us to implement a solution for it. Unfortunately, I don't know what the best solution is. Sure, we could in principle write metadata such as titles, tags, and descriptions back to the original image files. What about albums and their metadata though? For that reason I would prefer the sidecar approach (it's also less work, and one avoids file permission issues 😃). Is there any standard format for such sidecar files that we could leverage? It wouldn't be very useful to export that data to a format that nothing else can import, would it?

[relink2013]

Cool, I couldnt find any similar requests when I searched so I'll go check that out.

But to what you said, I am of the mindset that anything would be better than nothing. I dont know if there really is a "best solution" as everyon has thier opinions. Embedded metadata is the most portable and compatible...unless some other program decides to strip it out, which has happened to me without me noticeing.

There is an existing ISO standard for sidecar files, every program I have ever used that works with sidecars uses .XMP Files.. I have never had any issues with sidecars going missing, although I have accidentally seperated them from the original image before which is annoying.

Since Im coming from the midset of "what if Lychee disappears tomorrow?" I would think the best solution would be the one that can leave the user in the best position to be able to find thier files without Lychee. The solution I have been rolling around takes a couple of different approaches;

1. I would go with XMP files primarily, as they are one set standard, they also work with video files, aside from some formatting, they are human readable and there are numerous programs that can parse them for you. But Exiftool can handle embedding tags so I would also provide that as an additional option, and let the user choose one or both.
2. As for Albums, since there is no standard (that I am aware of) for Album names I would keep it simple. When an image/video is added to an album, add a tag for thoes files with the name of the album preceided by something that Lychee knows to ignore as a tag. Such as I add a photo to an Album called "Family Trip", that photos sidecar will have a tag added to it called @Ly_Album>Family_Trip, Lychee knows not to display any tags that start with "@Ly_Album>", but all other programs will display the tag making recreating albums in another program very very easy.
3. You could even do @Ly_Users> to tag photos with what users that image was shared with. or any number of other things the user would find useful.
4. I would also add an option for the user the download files or albums with or without metadata. This way you can choose at the time of download.
5. I am a huge proponent of being able to use my current file structure, but if thats not possible, atleast organizing all the files in one directory by user and date would make getting them back out much easier. The current file stucture doesnt really make much sense on its own.

I hope some of this was helpful. The reason I always go back to tags, is because not all metadata fields are read by all programs. However Description, Tags/Keywords, and Rating are read by just about everything.