To expand on my previous comment I dug a bit deeper the rabbit hole with exiftool to showcase how powerful meta tags are over conventional tags. I was curious how It would work and find an "universal" embedded tag system that works nearly on any software.

First thing first,from my personal research there are 4 important types of metadata fields:

• IPTC:keywords
• XMP:subject
• EXIF:XPkeywords (mostly for Windows)
• MacOS:MDItemUserTags (macos tagging system)

It's also possible to copy one over to the other. The most important ones are IPTC and XMP which are read by most image manager. XPkeywords and MDItemUserTags are OS specific to windows and macos respectively.

After some reading and fiddling around I used the following commands:

exiftool -IPTC:Keywords="Phil's Exif" Wallpapers/image_proxy3.jpg
exiftool -XMP:Subject+=one Wallpapers/image_proxy3.jpg
exiftool -XMP:Subject+=two Wallpapers/image_proxy3.jpg
exiftool -EXIF:XPKeywords="tagtest" Wallpapers/image_proxy3.jpg
exiftool -MacOS:MDItemUserTags+=tagging Wallpapers/image_proxy3.jpg

I spun up a lychee docker container to test if my tags are automatically recognized:

What does that mean ? Does are embedded meta tags that works with every software capable of reading the IPTC or XMP metadata. Those tags will follow your pictures rather than being bound to a specific software database. So your tags are portable and embedded into you files which is in my opinion a better long term solution.

There's probably way more to it and something that could be further explored is to export your metadata as .xmp file, add those tags into the OS (XPKeywords, MDItemUserTags), bash script to manipulates even further....

Hope it helps to give you a sneak peak on what exiftool is capable. I'm a noob with this tool but it already shines and shows it's power and capabilities with some basic commands.

Here are some resources if you want to give it a try and follow my trails:

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=15344.0

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=1752.0

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=15802.0

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=8591.0

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=13102.0

https://exiftool.org/metafiles.html#EX15

https://www.picturesandstories.com/news/2014/4/21/tags-and-captions-how-to-label-your-digital-photos-using-metadata