Manual Tagging falling behind
The % of photos tagged on the web has declined in the last one year. Eventhough there has been a tremendous growth in photo tagging the number of new photos posted to the web has just drawfed the number of photos tagged. Each day there are 5-10M+ photos uploaded to the web. At most there are 1M new photos that are tagged a day (at the most). So it is not keeping up. In total only about 100M photos are tagged. So in 10-20 days more photos are uploaded than all of the tagged photos combined. The advent of 2 megapixel camera phones and 3 megapixel camera phones are going to dramatically increase the number of photos taken per person per day. This will make the gap even bigger.
I bring this up because there was some debate (and a mention of Ojos ) by the panelists at the Tagging session at the Web 2.0 conference yesterday. Some were vehemently against it. Because auto-tagging would not capture emotional and editorial content. Some were for it because (my interpretation here) they just wanted a lot of implicit tags to be attached to their photos.
I was kind of surprised by this debate. Billions of photos are coming on line. Almost every person I've spoken to wants all of their photos tagged with who is in them. So what am I missing here?
It seems to me that user driven tagging and implicit (or auto-tagging) are both important ways to generate meta-data. Except that the technology for implicit tagging has been missing from photos....
Maybe Ojos changes that maybe it doesn't but I don't get the debate.
talking about tagging, we will have the feature of turning the auto-tagging feature off if need be?
Posted by: Tejas Patel | October 06, 2005 at 07:12 PM
Not really - but you can delete the tags if need be
Posted by: Munjal Shah | October 13, 2005 at 05:33 PM
Agreed, both implicit and explicit tags are important, if not critical to the future of photography; reliving, sharing and connecting, printing. To argue for either over the other is akin to arguing there is no need for printing because monitors and screens are everywhere. Reminds me of the old paperless office discussions.
Posted by: Sean Malone | October 15, 2005 at 12:44 PM
So, just after I writing the comment above, I saw this Washingtop Post article on the rise of paper cost driving WSJ to shrink paper size.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101551.html
Could the end of paper be near afterall?
Posted by: Sean Malone | October 15, 2005 at 12:55 PM