Tags are essential in allowing browsers (humans) to find your creative content. In flickr tags are especially important because images are the content and search engines require words to do their job. A picture without a tag is very difficult to find and with the millions and millions of photos on flickr and the internat your tagless photo will not be found. Which is one of the reasons I do not tag many of my photos. I am not interested in the casual stranger looking at my pictures. They certainly can if they would like but without a tag they will have a hard time even coming across them. I however am not hindered from sharing the photos with family and friends which is the main purpose of my account.
Of course if I was interested in the community aspect of flickr I would tag with abandon, letting any word that came to mind become a searchable word for my photo. On my personal blog I frequently use tags to attract the wandering internet surfer. Not that I get many on the line but at least the hook is baited.
2 comments:
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's careful about tagging. The organized part of me loves the idea, but the careful side of me says that I'm already bypassing the privacy of the people in my pictures by posting the pictures that I am not going to make it easy for strangers to find them. Like on myspace and facebook, I set my pictures to friends only and often don't say who's who (I figure the viewer already knows them or doesn't know and doesn't care).
Flickr was one of my favorites so I chose to look for interesting pictures, you won.
Post a Comment