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After moving my photos from Windows 7 to Google Drive and trying to search by keyword it looks like "tags" attribute is not fully used. I was able to search on Windows 7 and get all files with matching "tags" attributes. This does not work when searching with google "search" button. Is there is a way to enable it?

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Can't you edit the files and add the metadata in the format Google Drive expects? Use ExifTool to do so. You should also be able to copy the contents of the XYZ tag (don't see a tag called "tags") to the ImageDescription or any other appropriate tag (see all EXIF tags supported by ExifTool here). – Karan Dec 28 '12 at 22:11
Windows 7 has "tags","rating","title" and "comment" attributes - all useful for indexing. "tags" is moved into "description" by Google drive, but I am not sure about other attributes. However, if tags contains special characters it will be ignored. For example: tags="Subject/Poconos in summer 2010;" will not be fetched when looking for "Poconos" – Len Yabloko Dec 28 '12 at 23:00
To make things worse - if I manually remove special characters from "tags" and wait for it to synch with Google drive - the description on the drive is still empty. So the only way to fix it is to first re-format all the attributes (I will try using ExifTool) and re-export to google drive. Why is description not synchronized real time?! – Len Yabloko Dec 28 '12 at 23:37
Changing EXIF tags of JPEG files can be done using many tools besides ExifTool. I found several paid tools here adobe-edit-exif-data.sharewarecentral.com However, in my case I need to perform some soft of transformation or moving values from one tag to another. None of the tools I found allows expressions or rules. So it has to be manual operation. But have over 3,000 photos! Editing EXIF is not a good option. – Len Yabloko Dec 31 '12 at 1:54
Finally figured the confusion about what tags are indexed by google drive, and why sometimes index seems to work despite it. So here it is: the ONLY tag that is used for index is "title"; the only way for image to be indexed without title is by image recognition which is apparently used by google. My confusion was that even without title some images where fetched when searching for 'Spain', but not all of my photos made in Spain. Turns out some places in Spain (like Ronda) where recognized! – Len Yabloko Dec 31 '12 at 7:57

migrated from superuser.com Dec 30 '12 at 5:29

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