Discussion
Tags(back to index)When I began using folderblog, many of the photoblogs I visited had categories as a way to in essence 'tag' specific photographs for easy reference later on.
'Tags' are single word (sometimes two word) labels that makes it easy to find and share photographs later on.
The advantage of 'Tag' over 'categories' is that tags can become ubiquitous and be used on many unrelated photoblog websites. Categories are often, if not using names of the 12 months or weeks as categories, site specific.
In other words, categories may be considered proprietary whereas tags may be seen as open source, at a conceptual level.
I find recently tags appearing not just on flickr, but on regular photoblogs.
If I had my druthers, I'd take a working tag system over categories for folderblog.
Thoughts, ideas, suggestions...
I've thought about adding tags (the implementation on
slower.net is beautiful), but I haven't been able to come up with an efficient way to do it without a database.
(The current categories implementation could work as a tag system, more or less, but would be a nightmare. The thing about categories is that you usually restrict yourself to just a handful. With tags, you could need hundreds of categories, even just for a few dozen of photos.)
posted by
donald on 22 Jun 05 at 3:11 AM
I also prefer tags rather than categories... maybe in FB4? :-) I agree with donald, tags in slower.net are just amazing!
posted by
elpeaton on 1 Jul 05 at 9:17 AM
I really like tags (or keywords). For displaying on the web, they seem to make the most sence.
Categories are more like Galleries, which is how a photographer thinks of displaying photos in a real space. "how does each photo fit next to the other...", seeing them as a unit.
But the web is different, it is about seeing individual photos. the Galleries/Categories way of display feels very restricting, and almost pointless. The effectiveness of the Group is lost.
Without a databse, it would be difficult to do. Folderblog is amazingly easy, well thought-out and functional. Maybe allow for some kind of plugin structure for development of a DB extention for things like this?
posted by
pogo on 20 Jul 05 at 5:08 AM
One of the reasons I chose to use folderblog was its easy implementation of categories. Tags are fine for a certain style of browsing, but I don't find them as useful as some. For my work, I want to show specific projects that I am working on. The category method works great for this, and the ease of being able to upload a whole bunch of photos directly into a subdirectory (and thus categorizing them) is brilliantly easy.
