Can Emby look up XMP metadata in the photos?

[Teredactle 37]

Thanks for the explanation, I don't really understand why there is a new tag name created for this, when the standard for face tags in XMP file is "RegionName". Seems backwards to me to create something new instead of following the standard?

Why not make Emby able to read the RegionName contents?

 

RegionAppliedToDimensionsW      : 1768

RegionAppliedToDimensionsH      : 2656

RegionAppliedToDimensionsUnit   : pixel

RegionRotation                  : -1.43512

RegionName                      : Benoit Gindele

RegionType                      : Face

RegionAreaH                     : 0.04897

RegionAreaW                     : 0.03262

RegionAreaX                     : 0.59858

RegionAreaY                     : 0.72477

RegionRotation                  : -1.52229

[Luke 42078]

You're suggesting that RegionName is a standard for mapping into Emby Collections?

[Teredactle 37]

No, because maybe I'm not understading this feature with Emby Collections.

What I'm saying that in XMP metadata, RegionName is where face tagged names are saved. So if you would create something to look up face names saved in the XMP metadata, wouldn't you want to look up the location where it's the standard to save the face name? Sorry, maybe I am not understanding how this is looked up.

In my mind, if Emby can look up XMP metadata face names, it would look at the RegionName location upon a search  - i.e. if I search a photo library for "Paul", then in such a feature Emby would look up RegionName at all photos in that library for *Paul* and return only those photos where "Paul" exists. I don't even know if that is possible, and if so what kinds of load/stress it would put on the system.

I found this document (site has been down a long time, but the info here is valid, apparently the org is still there) https://web.archive.org/web/20180822085951/http://metadataworkinggroup.com/pdf/mwg_guidance.pdf talks about Region on page 51.

I am face tagging my photos using the XMP format, simply because this is how Picasa saves it, and does it well (also does well for face recognition). Would be great if Emby could perform a search in that metadata location

Thanks

[CasaAtardecer 27]

Hello @Teredactle,

@Lukedid not recently craft an Emby metadata tag for face/people XMP tags in photo files.

Rather, the recently crafted Emby tag for photo files is for Emby Collections, which is why it is called “embycollections”.

This was done for a number of reasons; the most important being the ability to use the Collections detail page to describe the details about the Collection.

The Emby Collections metadata tag is a string list type that allows for multiple values so your photo can belong to more than one collection.

Suppose your photo does not show a person or people? You are not going to have a face tag on that photo, but you still might want to do a search for it and Collections is searchable.

The Emby Collections tag allows you to have collections of photos that feature a person, or several people, a place, an event, a subject, the list goes on and on.

The strongest advantage of having a photo tag that Emby can read for Collections is the ability to write the XMP tag in your photos in bulk and avoid the need to add each photo to a Collection piecemeal.

Again, you will have to write your value or values into your photo files’ metadata, and call it “embycollections” to take advantage of this feature.

I hope this explanation helps to clarify the utility of the metadata tag.

Cheers! 

[CasaAtardecer 27]

On 5/16/2025 at 10:08 AM, Teredactle said:

embycollection will pull/find photos

Hello @Teredactle,

For Emby to recognize/parse a metadata tag in your photo file, the metadata tag in your photo must be named “embycollections” and the value or values of the tag can be anything you want, including the name or names of people shown in the photo.

If you just want to find the people already in your face/people tag that already exists in your photo metadata, you could easily duplicate the value or values into the subject photo tag.

Emby also recognizes/parses the subject tag into Emby’s TAG area, which is also searchable.

As a fellow shutterbug in a world dominated by video, music, game streaming, my goal is to encourage the good folks at Emby, like @Luke, to carve out a greater share of the development resources.

Cheers!

[Teredactle 37]

Thanks @CasaAtardecerfor the explanation.

So basically, instead of looking up a industry standard XMP tag (location for key words - face names), one has to populate a non-standard metadata tag location, that non other platform/software would ever read from?

I just don't understand why you would not build a feature that would work with an existing standard, and instead create a non-standard metadata lookup? I get that this tag can contain anything not just face names, but the RegionName tag would (for those whom populated that location) contain face names - why not use this metadata location (also) to auto-create collections?

[Luke 42078]

How would face names correspond to a collection?

[CasaAtardecer 27]

1 hour ago, Teredactle said:

existing standard

Hello @Teredactle,

My understanding is that Emby conforms to Dublin Core metadata standards for photo files because these are very common across lots and lots of photo file types.

There are most certainly other widely used metadata systems, for example, EXIF, IPTC, XMP, PLUS, and METS, to name a few, so Emby has chosen to read Dublin Core XMP, but only 5 tags at present.

Believe me, it was not easy getting the “embycollections” tag integrated into Emby’s parseable lineup. Prior to that it was 4 tags: title, description, filecreatedate, and subject. These 4 have been the limit since Emby was born, so I consider it a huge win for photo archivists to get the “embycollections” parseable XMP tag for photos.

Since Emby can group together any media type that has the same Collections value, video and photo files can be automatically filtered into a Collection or multiple Collections at the same time, without requiring the user to conduct a search or having to know what term is going to produce search results.

Like I said, Collections get the metadata-rich feature of having an editable Details view, whereas a photo does not. This is where having the power to assign a Collection name(s) to your photo, in a metadata editor setting in a bulk process, is vastly superior to even being able to assign the same Collection name(s) to video metadata files; specifically, the NFO xml file that must accompany every video for Emby to parse into its proper metadata database slot.

Feature requests for the Home Video and Photo library types are plentiful in these forums and the developers appear to focus only on those that have almost universal utility for all users, who happen to be mostly the movie/music/TV episode/gaming streaming folks.

It is a great, rare day when they turn their attention to photos. Right now, @speechlesand @ebrare actively working to improve and enhance the photo and video slideshow utility for Emby’s Roku app, and I cannot wait to see what they come up with.

Thank you for being a fellow photo archivist, and if you are like me and want to keep your photos off the cloud and free from face recognition AI and accessible via giant smart TV apps, then Emby is the place for you.

Let me know if you would like any details about getting your “embycollections” tags set up and populating it with your face value(s). I am glad to share what I had to learn after a lot of trial and error.

Cheers!

[Teredactle 37]

2 hours ago, Luke said:

How would face names correspond to a collection?

I mean the face names in the metadata would be used to create a collection, so if that RegionName contained Peter Paul Mary in say 40 photos, then you could automatically create 3 collections, Peter, Paul and Mary. No?

[Teredactle 37]

1 hour ago, CasaAtardecer said:

My understanding is that Emby conforms to Dublin Core metadata standards for photo files because these are very common across lots and lots of photo file types.

There are most certainly other widely used metadata systems, for example, EXIF, IPTC, XMP, PLUS, and METS, to name a few, so Emby has chosen to read Dublin Core XMP, but only 5 tags at present.

So Dublin Core is based on XMP, and for face tags XMP uses the RegionName location; for people that are face tagging and embedding this info to the file (like me, perhaps others), using this accepted standard location, it would be great for Emby to be able to read it when I search; I search for Paul and emby looks through the photos and metadata including the RegionName location and returns all photos with Paul in the title and Paul in the RegionName.

1 hour ago, CasaAtardecer said:

Believe me, it was not easy getting the “embycollections” tag integrated into Emby’s parseable lineup. Prior to that it was 4 tags: title, description, filecreatedate, and subject. These 4 have been the limit since Emby was born, so I consider it a huge win for photo archivists to get the “embycollections” parseable XMP tag for photos.

This is a non standard metadata location though right?, one has to create it within the header using XMP standard, then populate it. Once a JPG file has this "location" for metadata, then within Emby one can use the edit metadata, and it will provide this location (as well as the other ones mentioned) and make them editable by the user - am I correct so far? So I have to fill in this location manually for all 30,0000 photos that I have if I want to leverage this feature?

1 hour ago, CasaAtardecer said:

Like I said, Collections get the metadata-rich feature of having an editable Details view, whereas a photo does not. This is where having the power to assign a Collection name(s) to your photo, in a metadata editor setting in a bulk process, is vastly superior to even being able to assign the same Collection name(s) to video metadata files; specifically, the NFO xml file that must accompany every video for Emby to parse into its proper metadata database slot.

Ok, this is what I don't understand. Is this correct? I now have the "embycollections" feature, I right click on a photo and assign a keyword vacation for a photo; then when I go into the photos library, I can sort by vacation? I think I'm missing how this works, what is the workflow of leveraging this feature, let's say I have 10 photos. Can you give me an example please?

1 hour ago, CasaAtardecer said:

Let me know if you would like any details about getting your “embycollections” tags set up and populating it with your face value(s). I am glad to share what I had to learn after a lot of trial and error.

Yes please, I don't think I understand how the embycollections tag works or it's supposed to work. I get it that most people are not face tagging (either manually or with face recognition), but for me face tagging makes the most sense if I want to have a better search within emby, a "people" search for my own photos.

Thanks @CasaAtardecer

Edited May 26, 2025 by Teredactle

[Luke 42078]

37 minutes ago, Teredactle said:

I mean the face names in the metadata would be used to create a collection, so if that RegionName contained Peter Paul Mary in say 40 photos, then you could automatically create 3 collections, Peter, Paul and Mary. No?

Yes but you could create collections on other criteria besides faces. For instance you may want to create a collection for any image containing the color yellow.

[CasaAtardecer 27]

20 hours ago, Teredactle said:

Yes please

Hello @Teredactle,

It is important to me that Home Video and Photo library users are viewed as an integral demographic within Emby’s community, so I am glad to share with you what I have learned.

First things first: Do you know how to export a photo file’s metadata into xml code? This is important because the “embycollections” xml coding must follow the same xml coding that is used for “subject”.

You are not going to be using “keyword” metadata values. Secondly, do you know how to use cmd prompt and Exiftool? This will be important for two reasons: 1) creating the “embycollections” tag (sometimes called ‘name space’), and 2) copying the values from your already existing and populated metadata over to the “embycollections” tag in your metadata.

When you add this file to an Emby library type that recognizes photo file extensions, and you scan for new files, Emby will read the value(s) in your photo’s metadata and generate a new Collection(s) or add the file to an existing Emby Collection, if you have one already established in your library.

Depending upon your response to these questions, I will try to help you with the same process I have been using successfully since @Luke’s creation of the “embycollections” tag.

Incidentally, it is my understanding that the new, custom namespace tag was created to conform to the same standard as the “subject” tag, which gave it a tremendous advantage over any other new namespace tag that might be considered for adoption by Emby. This sameness is what gives it universal appeal and utility for Emby users, they just don’t know about it yet!

Cheers!

[Teredactle 37]

On 5/25/2025 at 11:58 PM, Luke said:

Yes but you could create collections on other criteria besides faces. For instance you may want to create a collection for any image containing the color yellow.

I guess others may, I won't, for me the most important piece is to be able to search people by name once face tagged and written in the metadata - I have other 33,000 photos and have been working on face recognition and tagging, it would be ideal to be able to read out of a standard tag through emby when doing a search - I'm not so interested in automated collections, but if that's a feature I may use it.

I can see how putting anything in the embycollection could be useful for others, I get it.

In 5-10 years we will have SW that will run through a photo collection and scrub what's in the photos to a database, then possible write it back into metadata. Then a search for "yellow + car + boat + Mary + eyes closed" will be that easy; but we're not there yet. I feel like the same will be available for videos, run them through SW which will play the video back and super speed and recognize what's in the video, even the conversation and save that info to search. I mean this stuff is likely already in use for gov't and such, but we will have it at home offline too at some point.

Perhaps not even "scrub" the files, but just a real time search; point it to your photos and videos, search for terms with logic statment, it will then return all photos and videos matching. Sure, assuming it's all on NVMe or such...

[Teredactle 37]

On 5/25/2025 at 9:50 PM, CasaAtardecer said:

Like I said, Collections get the metadata-rich feature of having an editable Details view, whereas a photo does not. This is where having the power to assign a Collection name(s) to your photo, in a metadata editor setting in a bulk process, is vastly superior to even being able to assign the same Collection name(s) to video metadata files; specifically, the NFO xml file that must accompany every video for Emby to parse into its proper metadata database slot.

Does this method involved having XML files along with the photos?

[CasaAtardecer 27]

10 hours ago, Teredactle said:

Does this method involved having XML files along with the photos?

No.

[CasaAtardecer 27]

Hello @Teredactle, Have you made any progress on your Emby Collections tagging in your Home Video and Photo libraries? If I can be of any assistance in helping you to properly code the metadata tag, I will gladly share my experiences in successfully adding the highly versatile and functional tag that can be parsed by Emby. Cheers!

[Teredactle 37]

On 6/20/2025 at 11:35 AM, CasaAtardecer said:

Hello @Teredactle, Have you made any progress on your Emby Collections tagging in your Home Video and Photo libraries? If I can be of any assistance in helping you to properly code the metadata tag, I will gladly share my experiences in successfully adding the highly versatile and functional tag that can be parsed by Emby. Cheers!

Hi CasaAtardecer, sorry I haven't had the time and don't anticipate having the time to work on this, likely till the fall. However, if there is a workflow for coding this into a JPG, I would like to look at it, i.e. command line, or with Advancer Renamer, etc, etc. 

Thank you!

[CasaAtardecer 27]

Hello @Teredactle, I am happy to share with you my methodology in the hopes that you and others begin to utilize Emby for Home Video and Photo Library hosting. The more of us shutterbugs that enjoy sharing our photo albums with family and friends through Emby's multiple UIs, the more development and refinement resources will be allocated to improving its features and functions.

Backup your photos to ensure you have unaltered copies in the event something goes sideways.

Download and install ExifTool by Phil Harvey (https://exiftool.org/) ensuring that the program can be read from any folder containing photos whose metadata you wish to edit.

Create a text document containing the following text:

%Image::ExifTool::UserDefined = ('Image::ExifTool::XMP::dc' => {embycollections => {  List => 'Bag' },},);1;

Name and store the previously created text document at a mapped drive path (e.g., C:\embycollectionstag.txt).

Open a cmd prompt in the same folder containing your photo(s) for upload into Emby Collections.

Execute the following command:

exiftool -config "C:\embycollectionstag.txt" -P -sep ", " -embycollections="Collection A, Collection B" yourphotofilename.ext -overwrite_original

Execute the following command to check that your new Emby Collections metadata tag was created and the correct values are populated:

Exiftool yourphotofilename.ext

Upload your photo(s) to Emby and execute a Scan Library Files command.

Your photo(s) should be grouped together in Collections under whatever value you used (e.g., Collection A, Collection B, etc.), including any videos that might also be added to the same Collection(s).

Please let the community know how you get on.

Cheers!