Tips for Effective Flickr Tagging

by Aaron on June 22, 2009

As I explore Flickr and look at others’ photos, here are some tips I’ve learned about effective photo tagging (as well as one pet peeve to avoid):

This one is almost too obvious, but always tag. Add some keywords so that folks will find your photos.
Add some “concept” tags. Think of the emotions, feelings, activities, or general concepts that might apply to a photo. Does the photo depict happiness, reading, or the idea of busy? Add those as tags.
Be consistent with plurality: Choose car or cars. Choose airplane or airplanes. Choose flower or flowers. Pick one method and stick with it, rather than some of each. Or better yet: use both.
Understand spaces: You have two choices to deal with spaces in tags. Either surround the tag with quotes like this: “new york” or simply remove the space and use newyork. If you simply type new york into a Flickr tag box, you’ll end up with two separate tags: new, and york.
Avoid this pet peeve: If you’re uploading a group of photos, take the extra couple of minutes to correctly tag the individual photos. If your batch of 10 photos contains 2 that have rainbows in them, don’t tag all 10 photos with rainbows — folks will get frustrated as they wonder why photos without rainbows are showing up under your rainbows tag.

By following some consistent guidelines, you’ll result in more exposure for your photos on Flickr. Feel free to comment with any other tagging tips.

Photo by sheldonschwartz, used under Creative Commons licensing

These other posts might be of interest to you:

Tagged as: flickr, keywords, tagging

JustinS

Have you noticed whether the Flickr search function tends to prefer one multi-word tag format over another? Using your example, would the search results favor the photo tagged “New York” or the one tagged newyork if someone was searching for that phrase?

http://www.socialphototalk.com Aaron Hockley

From what I’ve been able to tell, it ranks an exact match first, so searching with the space would match “New York” first before it matched newyork. I have no scientific basis for this statement, only a few casual observations.

http://www.justingolfs.com JustinS

Have you noticed whether the Flickr search function tends to prefer one multi-word tag format over another? Using your example, would the search results favor the photo tagged “New York” or the one tagged newyork if someone was searching for that phrase?

http://www.aaronhockley.com/ Aaron

From what I’ve been able to tell, it ranks an exact match first, so searching with the space would match “New York” first before it matched newyork. I have no scientific basis for this statement, only a few casual observations.

http://steveeshom.com/ Steve Eshom

Any idea how absolute Flickr searches by keyword are? For example if I search for car will it look just for car or will images tagged with cars be found too? (goes to your items on plurality)

http://www.socialphototalk.com Aaron Hockley

A quick experiment this morning seems to indicate that Flickr takes care of pluralization (a search for “bee” returns the same set of photos as a search for “bees”).

http://steveeshom.com Steve Eshom

Any idea how absolute Flickr searches by keyword are? For example if I search for car will it look just for car or will images tagged with cars be found too? (goes to your items on plurality)

http://www.aaronhockley.com/ Aaron

A quick experiment this morning seems to indicate that Flickr takes care of pluralization (a search for “bee” returns the same set of photos as a search for “bees”).

http://www.PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com/ Jay Thompson

“Concept” tags are (please forgive me) an interesting concept. And a great idea. Photos tend to evoke emotion, and I know when I’m looking for a nice CC License photo for a blog post, it’s often the emotion that ultimately makes the decision for me.

I tag very poorly in Flickr. This post is a big help. Thanks!
http://www.PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com Jay Thompson

“Concept” tags are (please forgive me) an interesting concept. And a great idea. Photos tend to evoke emotion, and I know when I’m looking for a nice CC License photo for a blog post, it’s often the emotion that ultimately makes the decision for me.

I tag very poorly in Flickr. This post is a big help. Thanks!