One of Facebook’s popular social features has been the ability to “tag” people in photos. Users can indicate who is in a photo, and that indication becomes a link to that person’s Facebook page. Yesterday Flickr added a similar feature, calling it “People in Photos” (Yahoo must’ve cut the funding for any sort of innovative or catchy name).
How to Use Flickr’s People in Photos
From a Flickr photo page, users can identify people in the photo. Along with the feature Flickr has launched a slew of new options that control privacy and permission settings so that one can control at what level he or she wants to participate in people-tagging. Check out the People in Photos FAQ for more information.
What Does it Mean for Serious Photographers?
While being able to tag your friends or family in photos is great, the feature could present some challenges for professionals or for serious hobbyists who are processing large numbers of pictures. My workflow (and I suspect that of many others) includes adding metadata keywords (tags) as part of the post processing before uploading to Flickr. Thus far I’ve added keywords for people that I’ve identified in photos, and those keywords will flow upstream to Flickr.
From what I can tell, there’s no way to perform Flickr people-tagging outside of Flickr (and there’s not any fast/efficient way to do it on Flickr either). For a photographer who occasionally delivers work via Flickr, expectations that people are tagged could potentially result in a significant new workload.
How will it shake out after the feature has been in the wild for a while? My suspicion is that those processing large groups of photos won’t be doing the people-tagging and that it will be more of an afterthought where individuals and viewers will add people to the photos casually and over time. It’s a nice new feature that will be quite a bit of fun, but like any sort of metadata the value will be proportional to the completeness.
What do you think? Are you headed over to Flickr to start tagging people?
Photo by selena marie, used under Creative Commons licensing
These other posts might be of interest to you:
