I haven’t tagged my photos in 22 years, relying solely on folders with a brief description and the date. But now I realise tagging might actually be a good idea going forward (and back). As it’s definitely getting unrulely.
I’m using PhotoLab and have started going back through and tagging people and places mostly, plus things like “landscape”, “flower” etc. Fairly high level. I have a “home” and “garden” tag which covers a lot of photos as well as a " day out" when we visited some place.
I’m sure some people add way more tags- do you and is it useful to you?
Relying on a file system to hold meta-data about images is bad practice. Never use file names, folder structure, or folder names to be the sole carrier of information. Image files themselves hold meta data, and it is best to make use of it. That way, your image files are truly portable, and contain everything that might need to be known if they become divorced from the file system.
In the past, a convention was to tag images with keywords. This was a tedious process and many photographers spent months and years carefully keywording and hierarchically organising keywords in order to feel that they could retrieve whatever they wanted with a simple search.
In reality, for all those years spent keywording, few photographers leveraged the keywords. In other words, they maybe spent a year doing complex keywording and never recouped that time with future searches, because after all that work, they only ever did a few searches. (“every image with me and a flower in it”). Fortunately with AI now, it doesnt matter, there is little need to spend time keywording. And as AI automatic tagging gets better, keywords will be needed less.
For “snapshots” adding brief descriptions to the meta data is good practice, especially if the images are historic, personal, genealogical, or informational. Descriptions should follow a consistent brief template, such as one phrase for each of : what-who, where, when, physical context. For example:
Martha [Hayes] Brown and Alice [Tate] Cook celebrating their birthdays on a boat. East River near Coentes Slip. Taken by Ron Brown June 3 2014..
You might argue that the date is not necessary as it should be in the exif date tag, but it’s good to have it in the description/caption as well; some web applications only show the caption. For scanned photographs, add physical context: ie:
Martha [Hayes] Brown and Alice [Tate] Cook celebrating their birthdays on a boat. East River near Coentes Slip. Taken by Ron Brown June 3 1927. Scanned 8x12 print stamped with Hansen Photography watermark. Hand annotated on reverse: “Having Fun!” in Ron Brown’s hand.
It is important not to over-tag: for a simple image of a flower, you might simply want the name of the flower unless there is some reason viewer need to know where that flower is. Other exif data will have that information.