HOWTO: Add Flickr tags identifying everyone at a party

Jun 01, 2006 14:32

Flickr is neat. It lets you add tags to each photo so that you can index your shots. At a party, for example, you might want to add the name of each person in an image. But that's a whole lot of typing.

I've got around 600 photos of our wedding and reception. There were around 200 guests, and I recognize about 150 of them in the photos. That's complicated.

Worse, if you want to use a full name as a tag, you have to put it in quotes.

The naive way to do it is to click "Add a tag" and then type:

"Ben Ostrowsky" "Matt Ostrowsky" "Peter Ostrowsky" "Ellen Fike" "David Fike"

Consider that some photos have 20 recognizable faces. Your fingers will be cramping!

Instead, use short nicknames at first:

me matt dad mom floyd

Then, when you've tagged everyone with nicknames, use Flickr's tag management options to change all instances of dad to Peter Ostrowsky.

Just make sure you identify people fairly consistently. If there are two people named Chris, you'll have to choose nicknames, use last names, etc. Capitalization doesn't matter, but spelling does (of course). So Rian and his son-in-law Ryan have their own tags, but if you use me for yourself, you mustn't use ME for Mary-Ellen.

And if there's someone in the photo whose name escapes you, just use whoami and come back to it later.

tagging, folksonomy, howto, flickr

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