I just visited a new Web 2.0 photo sharing site and saw a front page list of things you can do such with high up on the list: “Tag your photos!” Gee, is tagging that high up on people’s wish lists? I just spent some time organising the 750 or so (physical) photos we took while in South America (digital versions on Flickr) – it was a fun job and brought back recent memories as I sat cross-legged on our lounge floor.
Organising them on Flickr was as simple as putting them into albums (“sets”) for different parts of our trip. I started by bulk tagging photos (“South America”, “Peru”, …) but gave up quickly. I realised I wasn’t going to need those tags – I was just going to jump to an album and look through the set of photos until I found the one I wanted. Besides, I took about 80 photos of Machu Picchu (oops!) and they’d all be tagged the same. I’d need to look at them to figure out the exact one I wanted. In a sense, the albums were acting as my tags, I didn’t need anything further.
Tagging can be incredibly useful (e.g. for delicious) but often the tags slow me down from what I’m wanting to be doing – like one of those sign-up forms where I have to enter in lots of information before joining. If there’s no future value in the tags – or I can’t imagine one, I’m not interested in tagging them. Ok, so maybe I won’t have many people discovering my photos by accident on Flickr, but that’s not what they’re there for.
I just hope Web 2.0 applications don’t get caught up in tagging (because someone said it’s cool) and focus on features people need, problems which need solutions.
your thoughts
Hagrin
I think you need to look at tagging from the other side to see its utility. Tagging is more for others to find your information, photos, etc. and enhances the search experience. It’s not meant for the creator to use for organization although some people do (however, I agree with you – tagging my blog posts in Drupal all yield such similar tags that a more concise search works much better).
So basically, I would only spend my time tagging information if you want others to be able to find it. If not, i.e. personal pictures, I wouldn’t ever bother with tagging and see it as unnecessary.
Rachel
That’s true. Very few applications with tagging have advantages for me where I *want* people to find my stuff. I just can’t think of Web 2.0 apps where I want to tag.
John Labriola
Stop the presses, tagging is not kewl? I agree, the premise of tagging is for sharing information. For me it falls into the whole social aspect of this Web 2.0 thing. If I think about it, I categorize things for my personal usage, and tag what I want to share…
drazin
i think you are missing the point of tagging. its not mainly for your own organization but its for the sharing aspect. you click on your tag “Peru” and you get a list of all the “Peru” pictures that other people have taged their pictures with. its about sharing and easily sorting TONS of pictures from everyone. it may not be ultra valuable to your own pictures…but on the grand level its great.
Noah
Sure, tagging is great for the social aspect. But, don’t discount it’s value for the author. Right now, it might seem like tags are overkill for your few hundred photos that fit easily into a few albums on flickr. But what about those random shots? What about the shots that didn’t happen at an event or a location where the event or location wasn’t really important enough to create an album to represent it?
I think tags won’t really be useful to you until years and years from now when you are staring at your flickr page with 5-10 years of photos in front of you. Being able to type in “joe” and pull up all photos that Joe appears in is powerful. That’s something an album can’t do (unless you add every photo that has Joe in it to a “Joe” album).
Of course, you can just run a search in the descriptions. But, how many of your photos have you entered descriptions for? It’s faster to enter a few tags that hit all the main parts of the photo, than it is to describe the photo in a sentence/paragraph structure.
Also, tagging becomes even more powerful when you start combining tags in your search. I can pull up all photos that have the tag “joe” and “lauren” which will only show me photos where those two are together. Or “joe” and “bar”, or “joe” and “bar” and “me” … these are things that you’ll never be creating albums for.
Rachel
All good points but who knows if my Flickr account will be around in years to come. A lot of time is spent on future-proofing things which are so temporary.
I guess I’m saying that I *think* my memory of when/where I took photos is faster than me tagging them all for all the possible things I might want to remember in the future
Diane
It’s like maybe if we think tagging is cool and cutting edge we’ll do it, but really it’s an admission of a huge hole in the ability of computers to do what human brains can do.
Computers can’t do much with visual information but that’s what humans are best at. So we’re left with tons of visual information, “written” in a visual language that isn’t capable of being deciphered by a computer. And the best they can come up with so far is to beg us to tag it.
Maybe someday computers will be able to read binary information and see the same meaning in it that we do, but we’re a long way off.
nate
I completely agree! And, I wrote a post exactly on this topic, in case you’re interested.
There are many uses for tagging, but I think most of them aren’t being used yet. Tagging will be a fad unless the big boys start making it more useful than what they have so far.