Tagography ~ case studies

Stewart says:

Great post - thanks Stri :)
Posted at 10:37am, 24 June 2004 PST | Permalink

striatic says:

not a problem, mister butterfield.

hopefully it gives people some ideas on how they might use their tags.
Posted at 12:28pm, 24 June 2004 PST | Permalink

centrs says:

that is really beautiful when you look at all the photos with the "me" tag. page after page of those faces, it reminds me of the part in the film "cinema paradiso" when the lead character looks at what his friend left for him (don't want to ruin it if you haven't seen it). i love the humanity.
Posted at 2:00am, 17 July 2004 PST | Permalink

drock says:

nice post
Posted at 6:20am, 17 July 2004 PST | Permalink

illovich says:

The unfound tag has been perplexing me for about a week, ever since I first found the tags page.

It's a very popular tag, and it has the heavy air of the vernacular of criticism or a art movement... although I 'm at a loss to place it, so I'm not sure that it is.

Can someone explain to me what constitutes an unfound image? Is it simply an image that was not found by the poster, i.e. an image they created themselves?

Or is it something else?
Posted at 4:38pm, 18 July 2004 PST | Permalink

illovich says:

I agree with your assessment of the me tag. I have enjoed using google for similar purposes in the past, although it has its own interest when it's constrained to people who hve tagged their photos themselves.
Posted at 4:46pm, 18 July 2004 PST | Permalink

Schlomo Rabinowitz says:

Illovich, unfound is a pic that I took. As opposed to "snagged", which is a pic that I stole from the web. So I guess it is an art movement as it's the creation of something "new".

But the movement kept moving and I just can't keep up!
Posted at 5:28pm, 18 July 2004 PST | Permalink

striatic says:

you can find an explaination of unfound and other tags here.
Posted at 7:00pm, 18 July 2004 PST | Permalink

Just_Tom says:

I was perplexed by 'unfound' too. It seems like it's is actually more popular than 'photo' :)

I like the fact that people are tagging with colours (or colors, if you must). (I found out about it at apophenia, and there's more at Kottke).
Posted at 2:22am, 19 July 2004 PST | Permalink

striatic says:

it is more popular than photo because there are more unfound images than photos.

unfound includes photos AND drawings AND screencaps AND cg work.
Posted at 6:08am, 19 July 2004 PST | Permalink

Drift Words says:

(I think I've been round all the tag case study/ad hoc standards /suggestions posts now)

Tags are beautiful because they are simply one-bit labels (present=true?), and there's no formal relationship expressed or necessarily implied between any of them. They mean what the users want them to mean.

Which is exactly why they will become unmanageable and forgotten in the end [orders of magnitude more users], unless some structure is found. In fact, they code for less than a bit, since I can't say NOT(selfportrait) without making an unpredictably named second tag.

Soo, I could make up my own tag-grammar, but it won't help Miss Random other user unless she and I follow the same convention. And we've never met and don't read any guidelines so we won't.

My main suggestion is not saying "this tag should mean X" but that the system should structure users' meaning at some meta-level so it all gels. Think a DTD for tag-XML, rather than any document content.

Structure could start, for example, by coding the allowed relationships between Unfound, Snagged, Photo, Drawings and the other basic categories. These are necessary for all to comprehend others' material.

Less basic but still generic, would be tags denoting more-or-less objective features: location, media, member_of_series, belongs_to_group, is_of_person_X and other uncontentious aspects of each image. Some additional data parameters would be helpful for many of these. These are nice-to-have administrative aspects of the images.

Then you could leave the field open, as the present anything goes system, for interpretations ("grey, abstract, funky, loneliness") and all the other imaginations. This is probably where you want to leave well alone.
Posted at 2:22pm, 22 July 2004 PST | Permalink

striatic says:

Flickr Ideas!

not to sound rude, but this is not a feature request thread.

it is very difficult to have a discussion about the possibilities within the current system if it keeps getting sidetracked into a discussion of whether the tags suggestions should be collected in a wiki or in a thread ~ whether flickr should impose tag meanings or relationships or not.

Ideas is really the place for that, not here. i've had too many posts here that were NOT feature requests hijacked by calls for feature requests.

discussion of what people are doing or should do with flickr = flickr central

discussion of what devs are doing or should do with flickr = flickr ideas
Posted at 2:31pm, 22 July 2004 PST | Permalink

drock says:

can we see tags assoicated by people? not that the images are tagged by people but more so like "here are all of drocks tags"
Posted at 2:54pm, 22 July 2004 PST | Permalink

striatic says:

here are all of drock's tags.

:)

when looking for interesting tags, i don't normally start of that page. mostly, i start either by looking at something coming through "everyone's images" and click through to the tag, or i see something emerge through a group, or mentioned in chat.
Posted at 3:04pm, 22 July 2004 PST | Permalink

drock says:

ahhh there we go.. thx striatic :P
Posted at 6:40pm, 22 July 2004 PST | Permalink

matt says:

A couple of counter-examples. "coxy" is one of the 150 most-used tags. It tags (seemingly) all photos posted by the user "coxy". Both "photo" and "photos" appear on the list, despite meaning the same thing, from all appearances. There's even a certain amount of dissonance in "me" - is it anywhere someone appears? just the poster? just the person who took the photo? group shots (that's a little ambiguous, after all)?

A large percentage of locationally-tagged photos I've found aren't particualrly qualified. "San Francisco" with "California" or "USA", for instance. If your one of the people who don't consider San Francisco a part of either of those surrounding territories, there's also "Scotland" without "UK" or "Europe" as a good example. Place names also serve double-duty, for recognisable depictions of the places, as well as where a particular picture was taken, even when that picture is an otherwise unremarkable group shot at a restaurant, for example. This happens to some extent as well for tags used to denote an event as well as a literal description of the photo, such as 'fireworks'.

Lastly, there's the question of personal use vs. communal use - striatic mentions "photo" as an example, though "unfound" is another good one. If the vast majority of one's uploads are, say, unfound photos taken in Edinburgh, how useful is it for the individual to add these tags? I'd argue "not very" since it provides them with very little they don't know. They may instead tag the exceptions to this trend (a doodle they found in Paris, say). The group benefits most from tagging everything, of course, but would benefit more from having the standard set tagged.

This sort of annotation noise only increases with the number of annotators and pictures present, and ends up robbing tags of a good deal of their utility.
Posted at 1:53am, 23 July 2004 PST | Permalink

striatic says:

although it is pretty easy to manually add UNFOUND PHOTO EDINBURGH to all the images one uploads, especially because chances are it applies to the enitire set that you are uploading.

the 'mind tax' on doing this is pretty low. I find that when i am uploading/tagging and see the empty field i type in UNFOUND PHOTO OUTDOOR TORONTO almost by reflex, and then start consciously thinking about what other tags might apply to the specific set. then i upload, and comb through the images to add tags that don't apply to the entire set, but only individual images. this generally doesn't take very long to do ~ unless i am uploading some odd mixture of images, in which case i upload in batches.

{granted, this method only works if you are using an uploader or the upload page, not the flickrlive version or the bookmarklet}

but here's the thing:

the truth is that the most powerful public tags are the specific ones, like PICKLE PROJECT that create cool little galleries. TORONTO is marginally less useful. UNFOUND will never be a very useful public tag, and it was never really intended to be. this is more effective as a private discriminator to help narrow a search, or if you have a lot of SNAGGED images, allowing you to send others a link to a page that doesn't include them.

the other thing is that, yes, as users increase, there will be more noise .. perhaps up to 10% of images in the photo category might not actually be photos .. if so, how exactly is this a major problem? maybe 50% of images taken at the zoo are labelled 'zoo' and the other 25% are labelled as 'animal' and another 25% are labelled as 'animals' .. this doesn't mean that each of these galleries is suddenly worthless. surfing through either of the galleries will still be cool. you'll still find what you're looking for.

the point of tags {for me anyways} isn't some near airtight means of sorting images, it is simply a means to an end .. creating fun galleries to search through.
Posted at 9:31am, 23 July 2004 PST | Permalink

matt says:

I'm simply observing areas where the system doesn't work particularly well. It doesn't mean, nor did I say, that tag galleries were "useless" any more than a positive observation implies that tags are the final, perfect solution to the world's information indexing problems.

Where the system doesn't function particularly well is as useful for people to know about as what common tags mean, or any of the success stories already posted.

So while the system may be great at creating specific tag galleries like the pickle project, it's pretty naff at certain other uses, geography in particular. As a test case, take someone looking for pictures of Canada. 'Canada', as a tag, does get some pretty good stuff, but it misses out a large proportion of 'Vancouver', and 'Toronto', and doesn't catch any of 'Edmonton' or 'Nunavut'. Which is an odd parallel to the Globe and Mail, but I expect that's just a coincidence. In fact, no more than 19% of photos with Canadian location tags are also tagged 'Canada'. So while the 'Canada' gallery is still useful and cool, it's pretty far from being as useful and cool as it could be. Given the relative popularity of geographical tags (close to, if not the most popular class of tags), I'm pretty sure that someone will find this a fairly useful observation.

Quick methodological note, 'cause the scientist in me won't let me leave it off. I calculated the above stat by adding the totals of Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Nunavut and Arviatnunavut (747), and dividing by the number of Canada photos (143). This assumes (generously) that all Canada-tagged photos also have a more-specific geographical tag as well.

striatic says:

hm .. the question is whether the canada tag would benefit from the flood of images of vancouver, toronto, edmonton and nunavut. perhaps it would be, or perhaps not.

as it stands, 4+ pages of 'canada' are filled with "ritwick's" vacation pictures.

the question is whether all images shot in canada should be labelled canada, or mostly images which are somehow canada-ish.

for instance, should i label all the pictures in my apartment as 'toronto'? certainly my apartment is in toronto, but a shot from inside my generic living room might not benefit the 'toronto' tag very much, whereas a shot of buildings on the street might. or a street festival. or yet another shot of the CN tower.

tags are symbolic markers i guess. maybe the canada tag is better served as being viewed by thinking it as a collection of images that SAY canada, as opposed to a collection of images taken IN canada.
Posted at 5:55pm, 23 July 2004 PST | Permalink

ellipse says:

i think it depends on the size of the Nation.

NZ for example is 3 times smaller than Los Angeles.
Posted at 1:17pm, 25 July 2004 PST | Permalink

Stewart says:

We do have a plan for sorting the photos listed under tags that should make everyone happy (using an upcoming "interestingness" score).

For the record, I don't like the unfound and photo tags (as they are currently used) because tagging everything in the system with the same tag isn't useful (and having all the people 'in the know' tagging their photos with the same tag is only marginally more useful).
Posted at 9:15pm, 26 July 2004 PST | Permalink

Forrest O. says:

I've been tagging my photos with "yyyy.mm" (like 2004.07) as a hack to backdate older photos until we can set the "taken" date for each photo. I would like it if things like year, month, day, f-stop, shutter speed, image size, etc. were to automatically behave like tags in the future. Especially if you could do AND searches on tags and have the results with a legible URL.

A search sting might look like this to find surfing beach photos from june-july:

tag:(surfing AND beaches) date:(2004.06 OR 2004.07)

Then that "gallery" could be easily linked to...
Posted at 10:10pm, 26 July 2004 PST | Permalink

striatic says:

i can see where stewart is coming from .. although for me, the photo tag is invaluable because i have suck a volume of non-photo material.

when i want to link people to my photostream, i have to take into account all my comic related stuff that interrupts the narrative flow of 'photos from my life'

so when i want my sister or friends or mom to see my pseudo photoblog, i link them to my 'photo' tag gallery, and not to my photostream.

you might have a point on 'unfound' though, stewart.

'unfound' and 'snagged' were created at a time where images copied from the web were much more common on flickr. why were these images more common?

well .. flickr was much more IM centered, and image quality was significantly lower. in chat, a snagged image would often be a fun in-joke or sly comment. also, they were often used striking visual imagery that lent itself well to the chat environment.

since then, flickr has developed tools {including tags} that have de-emphasized chat and boosted the web side of flickr. image quality increased, pro accounts offered more space ~ and it finally became worthwhile to upload your own photographic work without fear of flickr's {former} compression mangling.

so at that time, there was MUCH more 'snagged' imagery floating around flickr. having an unfound/snagged filter made alot of sense.
Posted at 10:17pm, 26 July 2004 PST | Permalink