How to Use Tags in Immich to Finally Bring Order to Your Photo Library
Most of us have been there: a photo library that started out tidy and somewhere along the way became a sprawling archive of folders, unnamed files, and the vague memory that the photo you are looking for is definitely in there, somewhere. Albums help. Dates help. But neither is quite flexible enough to capture the way you actually think about your memories.
Tags are the missing piece. And in Immich - the open-source platform powering PixelUnion - they are a genuinely powerful tool for bringing your library under control.
What Makes Tags Different From Albums
Albums are great for fixed collections: a holiday trip, a family reunion, a year in review. But an album is a static container. A photo of your daughter at the beach during your Italy trip in 2022 belongs to “Italy 2022” - full stop. Tags let you describe that same photo in multiple dimensions at once: Family, Beach, Italy, Summer. Each tag becomes a lens through which you can later find it.
Think of tags as keywords you attach to a photo rather than boxes you put it in. A photo can have as many tags as make sense, and tags travel with the file itself - more on that shortly.
Hierarchical Tags: Organisation With Depth
One of the more thoughtful aspects of Immich’s tag system is that it supports hierarchical tags. This means you can build structured, nested tag trees instead of a flat list of keywords.
For example, instead of a tag simply called France, you might create:
Travel / Europe / France
Travel / Europe / Italy
Travel / South America / Brazil
Or for subject matter:
People / Family / Kids
People / Friends
Events / Weddings
Events / Birthdays
This hierarchy gives you two levels of access. You can search broadly - show me everything tagged under Travel - or narrow it down to Travel / Europe / France when you are putting together that anniversary album. The system is as granular or as broad as you need it to be.
Getting Started: Enabling Tags
Tags are not switched on by default in Immich. To enable the feature, go to Account Settings → Features → Tags and toggle it on. Once enabled, you will see a Tags section appear in the side navigation bar.
Adding a Tag to a Photo or Video
Open any asset and look at the info panel on the right. Near the bottom, you will find a + Add button under the tags section. Click it and either type to search existing tags or create a new one on the spot.
Creating a hierarchical tag is as simple as using a forward slash: typing Travel/Europe/France will create the full path, including any intermediate levels that do not yet exist.
Your Existing Tags Come With You
If you have been tagging photos in other applications - Lightroom, digiKam, Apple Photos, or even directly in file metadata - Immich can pick those up automatically. The system reads tags from the XMP TagsList field and the IPTC Keywords field, both of which are standard metadata formats used across the photography world.
If you have just migrated your library to Immich (or to PixelUnion), re-running the metadata extraction jobs will import all of your pre-existing tags. You do not have to start from scratch.
Equally important: any tags you add or change in Immich are written back to sidecar files. Your tags are not locked inside Immich’s database. They live with your photos. If you ever export your library or move it elsewhere, your tags come with you.
Finding Your Photos by Tag
Once your tags are in place, finding photos becomes a different experience. The Tags view, accessible from the left navigation bar, shows all of your tags in their hierarchical structure. Click any tag to see every photo and video that carries it.
You can also search by tag through Immich’s advanced search. Tags are one of several searchable fields, so you can combine tag searches with date ranges, locations, or other criteria to build precise queries across your entire library.
A Practical Tagging Approach
You do not need a perfect system from day one. A few principles that tend to work well:
Start with the big categories. What are the main themes in your library? Family, travel, work, nature, events? Create top-level tags for these first. Subcategories can come later.
Be consistent. If you use Kids in one place, do not start using Children in another. Hierarchical naming helps here - People/Family/Kids and People/Family/Adults are unambiguous.
Do not over-tag. Every photo does not need fifteen tags. Focus on the things you will actually search for. A photo taken at your sister’s wedding is helpfully tagged Events/Weddings and People/Family - tagging it Outdoor, Afternoon, Dress, and Flowers adds noise, not signal.
Use tags for things albums cannot capture. Albums handle events and time periods well. Use tags for subjects, moods, projects, or cross-cutting themes that span multiple events and years.
Tags in PixelUnion
At PixelUnion, your Immich instance is fully managed - which means the tag system is ready to use without any server configuration on your part. Enable it in your account settings and start tagging. Your tags are stored in your library alongside your photos, under European data protection law, with no third parties involved.
If you have an existing library with tags in XMP or IPTC metadata, get in touch and we can help you make sure your metadata comes through cleanly during migration.
The tools to organise your memories the way you think about them are already there. It is just a matter of putting them to use.