I tried out the Face Tag Editor plugin and looked at the PHP code. On my system the plugin was mostly in French, as are the code comments, and my French comprehension isn't very good so I might have missed something.

In any case it appears to me that the plugin saves the face tag in the file as XMP metadata (including as a keyword) and then later calls the Piwigo function sync_metadata to link the tags/keywords to Piwigo. However, sync_metadata does not appear to load metadata from XMP (only EXIF and binary IPTC) so the new metadata is never seen by Piwigo.

I'm not sure if something has changed in the connection between the plugin and Piwigo but if I'm understanding the current code correctly (which I may not be) the new tags/keywords will never be linked in the built-in Piwigo keywords.

(As an aside the Face Tag Editor plugin admin page (/admin.php?page=plugin-face_tag_editor) also does some odd things to the Piwigo Admin on my test server. It makes some of the text in the menu larger and adds whitespace above the page title bar.)

Environment
Piwigo 16.1.0 Check for upgrade
Installed on 30 November 2025, 3 days ago
Operating system: Linux (container)
PHP: 7.4.33 (Show info) [2025-12-04 07:23:41]
MySQL: 5.5.5-10.6.23-MariaDB-cll-lve [2025-12-04 07:23:41]
Graphics Library: External ImageMagick 6.9.13-25
Cache size 4.03 Mo   calculated 1 day ago Refresh

Activated plugin list 9
Admin Tools
Check Files Integrity
Delete Hit/Rate
face_tag
face_tag_editor
LocalFiles Editor
Maintenance Web Services
Media Icon
Personal Plugin

Last edited by moberley (2025-12-04 13:31:16)

Hi MattW,

MattW wrote:

"The tags are added to the Piwigo tag list."

well, I do not see this happening. For a start, tags seem to sometimes be called Keywords and oher times be called Tags. but searching through tags or keywords does not seem to show up any tags added in Face Tag Editor.

At my place, Piwigo is installed on a Synology NAS and the tags created by face_tag_editor are correctly added to the Piwigo tags, and I can create Smart Albums with these tags, whether with PHP IMagick or External Imagick.

Install the latest versions and if that doesn't work try adding the photos to the cart and select the 'Update metadata' action.
Let me know the result.
Is PHP Imagick enabled?
Can you upload a copy of the console output and the ./plugins/face_tag_editor/fac_tag_editor_debug.log file?

Last edited by Charles69 (2025-12-04 20:49:34)

Hi Moberlay, Hi MattW,

I think I've found the reason for the malfunction in your case.
For metadata synchronization to work, you need the following in your Local File Editor:

// use_iptc: Use IPTC data during database synchronization with files
// metadata
$conf['show_iptc'] = false;
$conf['use_iptc'] = true;

// use_iptc_mapping : in which IPTC fields will Piwigo find image
// information ? This setting is used during metadata synchronisation. It
// associates a piwigo_images column name to a IPTC key
$conf['use_iptc_mapping'] = array(
  'keywords'        => '2#025',
  'author'          => '2#080', // not 2#122, see https://piwigo.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=168381#p168381
  'name'            => '2#105',
  'comment'         => '2#120'
  );

I suggest you read the ./include/config_default_inc.php file, which contains the default Piwigo settings
and the documentation https://doc.piwigo.org/import-and-manag … tos-piwigo
Let me know if that fixes the problem

Sorry for the delay in response.

Thank you for the local config settings, I have applied them but is that documented somewhere that I missed? (The server I am testing on has a fresh install of 16.1.0 so the config settings were entirely the default ones, I had not made any local changes before this.)

With the changes in place I reuploaded my test images and tried applying face tags. It worked exactly as expected with my second test image but again failed with the first including when I applied the "Synchronize metadata" action in the Batch Manager.

I created the test images on my Windows computer with Affinity Photo 2, except the second image was resaved by Paint.NET.

So as an additional test I went back and re-exported the first test image from Affinity Photo 2 but without the "embed metadata" option selected in the export dialog box. This third image also worked as expected with the Face Tag editor.

When I reviewed the first and third original files in digiKam the difference appears to be that Affinity was embedding its metadata as XMP.

In the resulting tagged image this original XMP data is removed and the face tag data is inserted as XMP. However, in the original image (with XMP data) no IPTC data appears in the tagged version whereas in the third test image (same image but without the XMP data) the IPTC data does appear in the tagged version.

I have uploaded some new files to the GitHub repo for this test series.

The original images are:
1. https://github.com/moberley/face_tag_ed … Person.jpg
2. https://github.com/moberley/face_tag_ed … second.jpg
3. https://github.com/moberley/face_tag_ed … -third.jpg

The face_tag_editor logs are:
1. https://github.com/moberley/face_tag_ed … ound2a.log
2. https://github.com/moberley/face_tag_ed … ound2b.log
3. https://github.com/moberley/face_tag_ed … ound2c.log

And the re-downloaded resulting tagged images are here:
https://github.com/moberley/face_tag_ed … ged-images

Hi moberlay !

New version 1.7A https://fr.piwigo.org/ext/index.php?eid=1053

Now StickPerson shouldn't be a problem anymore ;)

Let me know how it goes.

Yes, there are plans to translate the labels into English, but I don't know when ;-)

I will do some more testing later but the only issue I noticed immediately is that the "show tagged faces" button appears to be invisible when it is off on the modus theme. The button is there I can click the area and turn it on. This happens regardless of whether the view XMP metadata button is on or off. I think it might be related to the filter CSS property.

Also the "view XMP metadata" button (if it is on) and the "show tagged faces" buttons are offset different amounts. Adding "padding-top: 0;" to the "view XMP metadata" button element and "display: inline-flex; padding-top: 0;" to the "show tagged faces" button seemed to make them line up.

I haven't seen any issues setting or viewing the actual tagged faces so far.

Last edited by moberley (2025-12-10 23:42:19)