How to use tags on Affinity Photo for ipad

[Affinity Rat]

I see APho has the ability to save tags…somewhere. What uses do these tags have?

Ios and Windows tags are not compatible, and these tags seem useless on the iPad. There doesnt seem any way to search for them. 

If I export an APho file with tags to a jpg,  I believe they are stored in file metadata, since as I recall they appear on Windows if copied there, but invisible to ios, and of no use at all to organize APho files, since no way to search for them, am I missing something here?

[Affinity Rat]

Are APho tags searchable on a mac?

[loukash]

i(Pad)OS tags and Mac Finder Tags are fully compatible. And searchable.
This tag concept goes as far back as Mac System 7 from the early 1990s when Finder Labels were introduced. On current Mac, the old Finder Labels and the new Finder Tags are still partially compatible and exchangeable as well. 

I'm using labels/tags since decades, every day, all the time.

[loukash]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Label_(Mac_OS)

[GarryP]

1 hour ago, Affinity Rat said:

I see APho has the ability to save tags…somewhere.

If you mean the Tags that are applied to layers then you cannot search for them from the operating system as they only exist within the document that contains the layer(s) to which they are applied.

The Tags in a document are simply colours which you can use to organise your layers.

[Affinity Rat]

28 minutes ago, GarryP said:

The Tags in a document are simply colours which you can use to organise your layers.

I’m no expert here, and more familiar with Windows than Mac os or ios, but some software uses side cars for tags, but apparently Affinity embeds in the file metadata, but not visible to ios. When exported to Windows as a jpg, those tags are visible by the os, but alas not ios.

Quote

On current Mac, the old Finder Labels and the new Finder Tags are still partially compatible and exchangeable as well.

Are you saying that on the mac, APho tags saved on afphoto files from ios are searchable? APho tags on APho files arent searchable on Windows os, but those exported to jpgs are.

My understanding is that there is a universal format for tagging files but not used, Windows and Ios tags are not saved in a universal shared location.

 

 

[loukash]

It depends on what you understand by "tags":
Keywords?
Those are embedded Affinity metadata, only readable within Affinity apps unless you export as an image with IPTC/XMP support, or as PDF.

Yep, some other apps call keywords "tags".

[loukash]

Or the whole collection of metadata "tags" in general?
https://www.exiftool.org/TagNames/XMP.html

Terminology matters…  

[walt.farrell]

22 hours ago, Affinity Rat said:

I see APho has the ability to save tags…somewhere.

Where do you "see" that?

[Affinity Rat]

To clarify what I meant by tags, I am more familiar with Windows terminology, than Apple or Mac os.

Windows refers to tags in some image formats what APho refers to as keywords, or Tags in Ios or Labels in Mac Os.

Unfortunately they meaning Microsoft and Apple dont use “Cross-platform file tagging standards include Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), an ISO standard for embedding metadata into popular image, video and document file formats, such as JPEG and PDF, without breaking their readability by applications that do not support XMP.” from Wikipedia. 

I’m still not clear on how to search for an Affinity Photo keyword, unless only there for the purpose of exporting to jpg et al.

 

[loukash]

XMP tags are platform independent. If a file format can store them, they will be there. MacOS will read them in standard image files or in PDF. i(Pad)OS can handle them as well if an app enables support for them.

APh has the Metadata panel to handle XMP tags. But you can easily add XMP metadata to afpub and afdesign documents as well: File→Edit in Photo. If you then export from ADe or Apu as JPEG/TIF/PNG, the metadata will be there, and a subset is also compatible with PDF.

The problem is that native Affinity documents (afpub/afdesign/afphoto) store their XMP tags within their proprietary format, invisible to any 3rd party app or to the OS. Some 3rd party apps (NeoFinder, for example) support XMP sidecars, however. So if you want to make your afpub/afdesign/afphoto metadata available to other apps, export them via APh as XMP and follow the required filenaming syntax, usually "Your Affinity Document Name.xmp".

[Affinity Rat]

Why does Serif, embed keyword tags in proprietary file format AND not provide a tool or DAM to access those buried keyword tags.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, Affinity Rat said:

not provide a tool or DAM to access those buried keyword tags

They do provide a tool: 

On 4/17/2025 at 9:10 PM, loukash said:

So if you want to make your afpub/afdesign/afphoto metadata available to other apps, export them via APh as XMP and follow the required filenaming syntax, usually "Your Affinity Document Name.xmp".

Many other proprietary formats also use this same standard sidecar method. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidecar_file

On the other hand, how do you access XMP metadata e.g. in *.indd or in *.ai files?
Turns out you can't, unless using an Adobe app like Bridge that can read and write them from the proprietary Adobe formats, or unless the *.ai has been saved with the PDF stream. But alright, Bridge is at least free to use. You can also relatively easily extract metadata from IDML because IDML is just a zip archive of human readable plain text XML files anyway.

[Affinity Rat]

On 4/18/2025 at 2:10 AM, loukash said:

So if you want to make your afpub/afdesign/afphoto metadata available to other apps, export them via APh as XMP and follow the required filenaming syntax, usually "Your Affinity Document Name.xmp".

Not sure what you mean here as .xmp isnt an export option, or are you suggesting just renaming the .afphoto extension to .xmp.

 

[loukash]

5 hours ago, Affinity Rat said:

.xmp isnt an export option

1. Metadata panel, ideally with some metadata in it, of course
2. click its "hamburger" menu
3. Export to XML

Or as usual, if everything else fails: 
https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/pages/Panels/metadataPanel.html

[Affinity Rat]

21 minutes ago, loukash said:

click its "hamburger" menu

Thank you so much, wasnt expecting additional export options buried outside the export menu!

 

[loukash]

2 minutes ago, Affinity Rat said:

additional export options buried outside the export menu

Yeah, the UI logic – or the lack thereof – is sometimes weird in Affinity.
But here it makes somewhat sense. After all, in Adobe CS apps the XMP export was also buried in a modal (!) window submenu.