Flickr photo tagging

Is it just me, or does it seem impossible to meaningfully tag a new batch of Flickr photos?  Websites tout tagging and related features as the backbone of the “semantic web“– but it seems to be that nobody knows how to tag images correctly.  Not even the folks at Flickr.

I navigate to Flickr’s help page on tags and what do I get?  A pretty useless help page, defining tags, explaining there’s a limit of 75 tags per image, and linking to two discussions from 2004.

Not even these discussions have any useful content.  Half of the recommendations are obviously dated; for instance, one recommends tagging by location (now obsolete due to geotagging), and another suggests classifying photos, artwork, etc. differently, a functionality which is now built into the system.

So the question still remains– how do you meaningfully tag a Flickr photo?  In my personal experience, I’m never able to find a method of tagging that’s completely satisfying.  For example, I can tag people by first name, but that doesn’t mean anything to folks that don’t know that person.  I can tag people by full name, but then I risk compromising that individual’s privacy.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that it’s an enormous inconvenience to change your tag hierarchy once a system is in place.  If, six months from now, it’s important for me to distinguish between “college” shots and “grad school” shots, for instance, I need to go back and add a “college” tag to everything that happened while I was an undergrad, and so forth.  What a pain.

Does anyone have a practical system for tagging photos (or even WordPress posts) that’s relevant in 2008?  Please, comment, I’d love to hear it.  Until then, I’m going to stick with my sets and collections.

Blog Directory

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

1. Delicious redesign launches, but I still hate tagging At long last, we have a new Delicious. Faster, more accessible, and better designed, the redesigned and renamed social bookmarking...
2. Lessons from the photo lab Since it's almost summer vacation season, I thought it might be useful and timely to compile a brief list of...
3. Why follow people you don’t know on social networking sites? I am curious to hear why you think it's a good idea to follow or not follow internet contacts, whether...