The Ever-Popular Thesaurus

A lot of people like to keep a thesaurus on hand to help them when tagging, but this isn’t always the best idea. On the one hand, a thesaurus can be a great tool to come up with synonyms you might not have thought of. On the other, a lot of those synonyms will have connotations that may not fit your photo. A good rule of thumb is that the more tags you have, the better the chances your words being irrelevant to the photo.

Getting Too Specific / ‘Laundry List’ Tagging

There’s always going to be the temptation to get overly specific and list off everything that is present in the file when tagging it. This is why some files now read like a laundry list of the photo’s contents: a picture of a basketball player making an epic slam dunk being tagged with “eyes, ears, hair, arm, shoulder, armpit, hair, hand, fingers,” and so on. While all of these elements are present in the photo, they’re not relevant enough for use as search terms. It’s pretty unlikely that someone searching ‘hand’ in hopes of finding a close-up of a hand will happen across your slam dunk shot and decide to change their entire concept in order to use your photo. Indeed, as RogerMexico said in the original K Is For Keywords, “resist the temptation to run off at the mouth.”

The same philosophy should apply when tagging photos to a location. Sure, that shot of a bird in the sky may have been taken in England, but the photo itself doesn’t communicate that too well unless the bird happens to be flying over Buckingham Palace. Avoid using locations as tags unless there is something in the photo that makes its location recognizable. After all, if a buyer is searching for “Egypt,” they want an image that simply SCREAMS Egyptian-ness. Shifting sand dunes are OK, but the Sphinx is even better.

To reiterate, here are the main points:

One tag does not justify another.

Please remember to choose your tags based on the content of the image, not the content of your tag box. A shot of a golf ball on a tee doesn’t justify the tags “sand trap” or “caddy” (or my personal favorites, “tiger” and “woods”). If you want to include these, compose your shot so it includes a sand trap and a caddy, or better yet, Tiger Woods. Good luck getting a model release. Stretching your tags into places they don’t belong made searches difficult under the old system, and it impacts the Controlled Vocabulary in different, but no less serious, ways as well.

Less is more

The Controlled Vocabulary does all your synonym-finding work for you: if you key an image to “nervous,” your shot will show up in searches for “anxious,” “on edge,” “fretful,” even “butterflies in the stomach.” So you really only need one tag assigned to any given term.

Above all, literalism is king. That sentence illustrates the inherent imprecision of English perfectly: literalism isn’t actually ‘king’ of anything, it’s just the most important thing to keep in mind when tagging your files.

Nicknames, figures of speech, metaphors and metonyms are part of what makes English so rich and exciting, but they also create a ton of problems in a search engine. A detective might spend his day “fishing” for information, “harvesting” facts from the “pigeons” on the mean streets. But can you imagine the confusing search results if photos of detectives were tagged to these words? A photo of a climbing vine might be the perfect metaphor for a rapidly growing business venture, but we’ll leave that up to the designer: tags like “stocks,” “entrepreneurship” and “business” are completely out of place. Keep “growth,” though.

We can’t stress enough how important it is that contributors keep their tags accurate. Better tagging means better search results, bringing in more users, which means more sales for your images. The sooner everyone disambiguates their files and checks their tags for accuracy, the sooner searches will improve.



Image Credits
Back to School series by anouchka
Delicious by Pleio
Fresh Tomatoes by kcline
Lightning by WorldWideImages
calculate by redapplefalls
Playing Basketball by Renphoto
Gangster by pascalgenest
Ivy by pattersonminx

Please note that all the example keywords are purely fictitious. Thanks to the photographers for being good sports.