Tagging images - What tagwords to use?

[Jonta]

What kind of words should I tag my images with to be consistent? How do you do this?

I have a lot of images I want to tag. And I want a convention to start out with.

(I wrote a more elaborate version of this on another forum, but alas, nobody answered. I can provide this if this is not clear enough)

[wulf]

It depends what information you want to be able to use to extract them by. I have written a small web page (which lives on my local machine) to help my consistently tag the shots I put on Flickr. I have settled on a pattern which includes the following sets of options:

Camera
Nikon D40
Fujifilm Finepix
JVC

Lens
18-55mm
50mm
70-300mm
Vivitar
Vivitar (macro)
Raynox
Lensbaby
Lensbaby (creative aperture)
Lensbaby (macro)

Processing
unmodified
cropped
Gimp
iPhoto
RAW

Privacy
Family
Friends

Ratio
1:1
2:3
3:2
3:4
4:3
16:9

Camera Setting
aperture
f/1.8
f/2
f/2.5
f/2.8
f/4
f/5
f/5.6
f/7.1
f/8
f/11

License
(c)
(cc) Attribution - Non-commercial - Share-alike

I also have text boxes where I can note the date (which gets entered as 20090918 and 200909 so I can zoom in on day and month), dimensions and anything else (which is used for things like main subjects and perhaps notes on colours or approaches, eg. bee, green, silhouette).

Wulf

[Nicole]

I can definitely appreciate the wanting to start out with a convention. Put it this way, I'm pretty much in the same situation described here: The Great Photo Organization Project | Photodoto . I was struggling with how to get my tags organised into something that would let me start re-tagging all my photos that had the wrong tags and adding tags to ones without tags. I've only just started, but my starting point for tag groups was:

• Activity
• Appearance (e.g. colour, texture, shape, materials)
• Event
• Gear
• Nature
• Location
• People
• Objects
• Selling
• Flickr

And then each of those had a number of keywords and categories under them. And while what I did was move all the tags I'd already used into these categories (plus more that I can't remember off the top of my head), once I started tagging I realised that there were more words I wanted / needed that I hadn't already used. So there's now a default category for "Uncategorized" keywords.

I toyed with looking for something that would help me out with keywording. There are things like:

• Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (free, but kind of over the top because you're winding up with lots of tags you may never use)
• Controlled Vocabulary ($70USD, aimed at photographers, but I've never used it)

In the end I wound up creating it myself because I couldn't really justify spending the extra money. What I have been doing is using a thesaurus and adding additional synonyms to my keywords.

Not sure if that helps you out at all. Keywording is massively daunting which I know is why my library has gotten to the state it's in. Good luck!

[wulf]

A useful concept to remember is that tags aren't fixed (at least with any tagging system worth its salt). Go back from time to time and look at the tags you have used. You may well find instances where you have several variations (eg. mispellings) that could be rationalised into one tag. Another way to develop your tags is when you are looking for something and can't find a photo that you know should be there (for example, maybe you should have tagged that kitten as cat as well as kitten and cute).

My system has developed over time and meets my needs - for example, I can use the fact that I always include a tag for the lens I used to pick out all of the photos I have taken with the D40 kit lens (useful if I want to find an example to prove that it is a decent bit of glass).

Wulf

[Jonta]

Thanks for your replies. I'm really aching to get started.

Here I quote my original post:

I am now up to the point where I'm going to tag all of my photographs (about 3k).

Technical aspect/explanation:

- EXIF is already there, seeing as that is written by camera. EXIF-info contains shutterspeed, aperture, time and date of the image and so on. Mainly it's not meant to be changed.
- IPTC is a pretty old standard it seems (1979 I read). It is used for adding tags and descriptions, like "horse, riding, sport, animal".
- XMP is newer, and based on XML. Seems to do about the same as IPTC, but I get the impression that it's the new open standard for metadata for images.

Read here for more on EXIF vs IPTC if that is still unclear.

I use Picasa to sort out images on disk, and upload them to flickr to store and show them online.

When tagging an image in Picasa, IPTC is used. flickr supports IPTC. You can try it yourself: Tag an image with something in Picasa, then use Uploadr for instance. And you can already see it being tagged with the tag or tags from Picasa.

Picasa and flickr both support IPTC and EXIF, but not XMP it seems.

What I have decided to do is just going for IPTC right now, and hoping and mailing about XMP-support. Getting flickr and Picasa to write tags in both IPTC and EXIF would be awesome, and I expect that either they, or someone externally will build a tool to do this when the time comes.

Note: There seem to be formats that XMP and IPTC don't support. Should think XMP supports more, like RAW.

If you have any questions about this, then Google Inc. has a great searchengine, or you could make your own thread linking back to this one.

"Linguistical" aspect:

But what to use as tagwords/tags?

This is my question in this thread. I thought I'd just add some information that I would like to have had approximately yesterday.

Seeing as virtually none of my images are tagged (I have them sorted by year/month/event on disk. Pretty good system it seems. Please come with suggestions that improve it. (and thanks to the person, possibly on this forum) that wrote about this, and which gets the most creds for me using it).

So I want to have a good convention on what I use as tags before I start.

Things I've thought about:

* Places - Tagging with places if relevant. For example: Louvre, Paris, France
* People - Names if I know them. Just came to think of: Could have things like "old man" if I take photographs of people I don't know.
* Black-and-white - I first dueled them with Google ("bw": 51M, "b/w": 14,2 M, "b&w": 17,3), but then I looked at the Wikipedia-article, seeing as there are often synonyms written in bold at the top of the article. There I found what I'm probably going to use: monochrome (which "allows" me to tag sepia (Bob forbid) and other similar effects)
* Animals - Hm, probably something like "dog, Oscar" if the name was Oscar. Maybe also the latin name if I knew it.
* Plants - Pretty much the same. (What? You don't give your plants names?)
* Emotions - Possibly. But this is where it starts getting shaky. If I do a theme or shoot or whatever on sadness, I might tag them with "sad", but doing this to all images containing people?...
* Cars - Brand and model I should think

Also, I decided pretty early on that I would tag them in English.

So, what do you think? I want to get a good start at this, so a preformed convention/set of guidelines would be great.

[wulf]

So... how did you get on with this?

Wulf