Photo-tagging

Obsidian plugin for tagging people on photos

• Motivation
• Installation
  • Obsidian Community Plugins
  • Manual installation
• Manual
• Tests
• BDFL

Motivation

I have a lot of genealogy data regarding my family and its history. I use Obsidian to work with this data. At some point, I needed a simple software to tag people on photos and then show a person's photos on their page. I did not find the existing plugin, so I decided to write my own.

Installation

[!IMPORTANT]
You must have libvips installed. See installation instructions: https://www.libvips.org/install.html.

Nope, you cannot disable it.

libvips is used to generate image tiles (image pyramids). The photo-tagging plugin uses it to handle large images.

When the user opens the image in the tagger for the first time, the plugin automatically generates image tiles and a preview image. The plugin will use them to display and zoom large images effectively.

Obsidian Community Plugins

The photo-tagging plugin is available in the Obsidian Community Plugins list. So, you can install it right from the Obsidian app. Here is a direct link to the plugin page: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/photo-tagging.

Manual installation

You can install the plugin by downloading the release assets, placing them inside your Obsidian vault, and enabling it in the settings:

1. Go to the TheBestTvarynka/photo-tagging/releases page and download release assets: main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css.
2. Place these files in the vault plugin directory:

VAULT_DIR=/path/to/vault
PHOTO_TAGGING_DIR=${VAULT_DIR}/.obsidian/plugins/photo-tagging
mkdir -p ${PHOTO_TAGGING_DIR}
cp main.js ${PHOTO_TAGGING_DIR}
cp styles.css ${PHOTO_TAGGING_DIR}
cp manifest.json ${PHOTO_TAGGING_DIR}

3. Enable the Grafily plugin in the Obsidian settings (Community Plugins section).

Manual

1. You manually add tags to photos using the built-in tagger:

   You can open tagger from the file context menu (Tag people option):

   

2. Every tag is linked to some note. In my case, every note represents a person.

3. Add the following code block to see the person's photos inside the note:

       ```tagged-photos
       ```
   

   The plugin automatically resolves photos assigned to the current person:

   Person's plain gallery	Photos are grouped by hashtags

   By default, the block shows photos where the current note is tagged. Add one of these options inside the block to change that:

   Option	Shows
   group: hashtags	Photos where the current note is tagged, grouped by hashtag.
   type: hashtag	Photos with the hashtag named like the current note.
   hashtag: <name>	Photos with the <name> hashtag.

4. Select a hashtag in the tagger to open its tag-<name> note at the root of the vault. The note is created on first use and contains a block with the hashtag: <name> option.

All tags are saved inside JSON file. By default, the JSON file is located in the photo-tags.json at the root of the vault. You can change it in the plugin settings.

Tests

Integration tests run in a real, isolated Obsidian instance using obsidian-integration-testing. You must have Obsidian and libvips installed.

npm test

Each test copies assets/base_vault into the test_vaults/ directory and installs the fresh plugin build there. The copy stays on disk after the run, so you can inspect it.

BDFL

Did you hear about BDFL?

TL;DR:

Benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is a title given to a small number of open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community.

For the Photo-tagging project, the BDFL is @TheBestTvarynka (Pavlo Myroniuk), original creator of Photo-tagging.