Does not detect built-in Exif tags

[bagarwa]

Looks like this app only works with it's own proprietary tags. I have thousands of photos with multiple tags added to them, and Windows 11 file explorer recognizes them. But this app doesn't recognize any.

I'm looking for an app that will let me browse my photo library by exif tags. Like this -

1. Open app
2. Add my photo library location to it.
3. It scans all photos and recognizes all tags in the EXIF data.
4. In the sidebar, it shows the photo library by folders hierarchy.
5. Also shows the photo library by tags. (As in, when I expand the tags browser, it will show all tags that my photo library has, and clicking on any one of those will show all photos that have that tag.)

Does such an app exist?

[Antoine-lb]

Hello @bagarwa,
Did you import the tags?

Once all of the pictures are loaded into Allusion you need to go to settings (or press S)

Import/Export on the side

And click Import

If this doesn't work it would be interesting to see what metadata tag are your tags using, there are multiple ones

[bagarwa]

Hi @Antoine-lb
Thank you so much for your response and guiding me with steps. I did not even think of checking the settings. I was expecting the tags to just show up after adding the root folder to the app. I'm so glad that it is there. Finally found such an app.

[bagarwa]

So... looks like there's still some gap. After doing that "Import", Allusion is creating a copy of those tags in-app. When I open an image in-app and remove some of the tags, those changes are saved only in-app, not in the actual image. The image's actual tags in the EXIF data don't change.

Yes, there's the "Export tags to file metadata" button in settings. But having to do that after every tag change is not a good workflow. It'd have been better if there was a "save" or such option in the tag editor page that saved the changes directly on the file EXIF.

EDIT: I did try the "Export tags to file metadata" now, and it does seem to work and file metadata shows updated tags, after a minute or so, the old tags are getting restored!! No idea what's happening there.

[Antoine-lb]

Hello @bagarwa

those changes are saved only in-app, not in the actual image.

That is correct

But having to do that after every tag change is not a good workflow

Completely agree, but I'm not a mantainer of Allusion, I can't make changes to the repo. It's why we made a fork of it https://onefolder.app/. In this fork we have plans to remove the need for importing and exporting tags. We already simplified the import process, now we have to fix the export.

Sadly I can't help you more than that on Allusion :/