Categories, do you think that they are useful?

Categories, do you think that they are useful?


 


Personally I don't understand the sense to have categories, today.


 


At first there is a big lack of categories and most of the time the images don't really fit in one.


 


Then I am not sure that customers use categories in their research (I am almost sure they don't). 


In fact when a customer is looking for an image he perfectly knowns what he wants. 


And if he searches by category he will get 1 000 000+ images, and 90% of these images will absolutely not correspond to what he is looking for.


So, if he need a photo of a "blue banana" he will surely not look in category "fruits" or "food" (and which one is the right one, as a banana is a fruit and a food too?), but he will directly enter the keywords blue + banana.


 


So why to "annoy" contributors with categories (a big time wasting)?


(In most of the most new image banks they stopped to use)

it is sure that it lacks a number of category ...

No. From where I sit, they are a nuisance:


    - As pointed out above, many times an image does not fit into any "category"


    - An extra step to do on upload


    - The category history on upload has been broken for ages.

(Edited on 2013-03-01 20:26:54 by wdstock)

Yes, a nuisance, probably legacy code also and most sites seem to have them. I've given up on going deeper than the major category heading, that's what keywords are for to me. But let's do not give targets for the software folks, they have enopugh on thier plates and if it is legacy code then they probably have no documentation for how to change it and its probably written in sanskrit.

I've noticed that category names have been added as keywords (by the inspector?) in many of my images. Perhaps this is a transition to not having categories anymore?