Photo Tagging
May 11th, 2008
For Mother’s Day, I bought my Mom a gift membership to Flickr. Anytime there is an opportunity to organize something, my Mom goes crazy and I ultimately get sucked into it myself. Organizing is what we do best, and while our lives are not impeccably organized, we appreciate things that are and continue to strive for organized perfection.
So when it comes to photos, we are looking for the perfect tagging solution. Not only for the collection we have on our computer but also for Flickr. Since the majority of our pictures were taken at Disneyland and Walt Disney World we suffer from two parks that could conceivably contain the same tags. For instance, they both have Fantasylands, Tomorrowlands, Adventurelands and Frontierlands. They both have Pirates of the Caribbeans, Big Thunder Mountains…Well, you get the drift. Tagging under these circumstances is difficult especially when I don’t want to come up with special codes indicating which park I’m referring to, it makes tagging messy.
Maybe it’s impossible without entering in multiple tags to indicate which Tomorrowland I’m looking for. I’m sure there is no “right” way to tag photos, but I want the efficient way and I know there aren’t many of those.
What would be the most efficient way to tag this picture?
This is chef Oscar, my Mom and me at Carnation Cafe on Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland. The picture was taken on December 15, 2005.
I would tag it based on 5 general categories: Time, Event, Location, People and Misc.
Time: 2005, December
Event: Vacation
Location: “Disneyland Resort”, Disneyland, “Main Street USA”, “Carnation Cafe”
People: Oscar, Patty, Mom, Jason
Misc.: Chef
Maintaining a broad to specific flow within each category you can see the logic behind my tagging system. I like detailed tags with pictures taken at Disneyland, in part because Disneyland makes it easy; everything has a name. So if I wanted to see all the Main Street USA pictures I can, all the pictures taken at Carnation Cafe, done, etc.
There is one peculiarity about the above tags. I placed Chef in with miscellaneous tags. If I’m working from broad to specific within people I could have placed Chef before Oscar. I didn’t for one specific purpose, Chef is an occupation and not a description of who Oscar is. Mom on the other hand is preceded by Patty because that is who she is not what she does. Will I ever search photos of my mom using Patty? No, but the rest of my family might.
I have a very organized system for tagging photos. Now I just need to go through all 3,600 of them and put it into practice. A job I’m not looking forward to. Tell me, how would you tag that photo?
