Your approach to tagging photos

firewireguy

firewireguy

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So after 22 years of taking photos I've come to the conclusion that I should start tagging my photos so I can find them easier.

Last year I bought PhotoLab and I've been really happy with it. When tagging pictures the tags get saved in the sidecar .dop files rather than in the raw or jpeg files, which is fine - I prefer that over stored in a database. I'm sort of tied down to using PhotoLab forever more, but could in theory extract them out and write my own parser as the .dop files are just XML.

I've been going back and tagging pictures based on who is in them, if its of flowers, landscape, architecture, beach etc. But I don't know what to do about a lot of shots which are just pictures of something / a time and place. The kind of family snaps of a day out or something happening (or not) on the garden, or on a walk around a park.

What do you tag these with? "General"?, "snap"? "Documentary"?

I'm finding I have quite a lot of shots like this, recording family life that are important but don't fit into a photography style.

I feel like this whole process is going to take me several months to complete so I want to get off to a good start.
 
firewireguy said:
So after 22 years of taking photos I've come to the conclusion that I should start tagging my photos so I can find them easier.

Last year I bought PhotoLab and I've been really happy with it. When tagging pictures the tags get saved in the sidecar .dop files rather than in the raw or jpeg files, which is fine - I prefer that over stored in a database. I'm sort of tied down to using PhotoLab forever more, but could in theory extract them out and write my own parser as the .dop files are just XML.

I've been going back and tagging pictures based on who is in them, if its of flowers, landscape, architecture, beach etc. But I don't know what to do about a lot of shots which are just pictures of something / a time and place. The kind of family snaps of a day out or something happening (or not) on the garden, or on a walk around a park.

What do you tag these with? "General"?, "snap"? "Documentary"?

I'm finding I have quite a lot of shots like this, recording family life that are important but don't fit into a photography style.

I feel like this whole process is going to take me several months to complete so I want to get off to a good start.
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Photolab should be able to write metadata to "universal" XMP files. as well as storing the data in the program database or *.dop file. I think it's been there since v5.

Why not just use a keyword (tag) of "family" for these misc pictures. You can still also add "landscape" "beach" etc as additional keywords, where that seems appropriate..

I add location data to the metadata when I ingest files from the memory card and then add keywords after ingest,. I would therefore still just keyword my home garden with "Garden" just as I might keyword a National Trust garden, with "garden", knowing I could search for my home village and garden to get all the pictures from "my" garden. edit: I also use a "personal" keyword for pictures only of personal/family interest.

I'm not sure if DXO allows you to create metadata templates, but this is lkely to be the quickest approach. Create templates for places you visit regularly, and sort your pictures into batches that need the same template.
 
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I'm not especially good at the discipline of tagging files on import, but I ALWAYS add email address, then location, plus any obvious characteristics (i.e. Blackwell's, bookshop, underground, Norrington room, Oxford, home counties, England, UK). I don't add a category like documentary which is very broad, but might include 'action' or 'portrait'. I'll sometimes also add an attribute for a specific purpose, like 'straight lines' for the new old digital competition theme when scanning visually through the collection to help me find it later.
 
I use LR which is a very efficient way of using such tags (or keywords in LR). I have a list of about 40 headings some of which have several lower level keywords. So for instance I have "Nature" but below that I have "Birds". "animals", "Flowers", "trees", "insects", "fungi" and "Geology". I have no need for a "General" keyword as I cover such a wide range with my keywords. Of Course, many images are tagged with more than one keyword. A shot of an Urban fox from my window is keyworded ""Urban-Street" and "Nature-Animal" so would be easy to find also bearing in mind you can use many other search criteria in LR (e.g. Camera EXIF data). I have used the same keyword list for many years now and try to avoid adding to it now,

Dave
 
firewireguy said:
So after 22 years of taking photos I've come to the conclusion that I should start tagging my photos so I can find them easier.
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Funnily enough I was thinking of starting a similar topic because I'm pretty much in the same position.

Are you planning on manually tagging all your files? I'm also using Photolab so definitely interested in how you handle tagging your photos from now on.

I've been trying to research different pieces of software that can help but there seems little consensus on what to use and I end up getting lost going round in circles. I did try Excire but I wasn't too taken with it, I was hoping it could automate people tagging by identifying the same people in photos so I could then tag them. However when I tried that it mixed people up claiming they were the same person when they clearly weren't. Where it seemed to work well is if I gave it a text prompt it would find suitable photos so I could see it being useful for a professional photography wanting to quickly pull out suitable photos but that's no tme.

Mylio is subscription only so it's out the window so the other one I've seen recommended is iMatch. Ultimately I think part of the problem is no software is going to be able to identify locations so I'm doing to need to do that manually anyway.
 
I use LR Classic now, and on import I am using Keywords for the location, camera, and aspects of the image such as water, bridge, etc to describe what's in it; and I use Collections to group images into sets for genre and in cases like mentioned, I have a collection called Things, which has sub-collections for bridges, tools, etc, but I also have other Collectiuons for landscape, nature, etc that also have more specific sub-collections. I've recently changed my workflow to make better use of these features.
I don't however have the issue of retrospectively doing this for many years of photography, yet on the other habnd I'm now thinking of creating a new catalogue and re-importing my images after doing some culling of the rubbish.
 
Using LR classic - I keyword everything with a bare minimum of location info, even if this is just ‘home’ using the hierarchy of where, what and/or who.
Then solely use smart collections based on keyword and location data to organise.
Using Jeffrey friedl’s smart collection sync plugin means I can then sync smart collections to the cloud Lightroom.
None of that might be relevant , the point of tagging though gives you multiple ways to find a photo quickly, ie - I know it was a pic of this person in this park in roughly this date, you can use any of the 3 to find it depending on what you remember.
Another advantage of using tags to find pics is if you choose to change your workflow or software in 5 years time, the tags will help you change quicker than just a folder structure.
I don’t bother with non helpful tags - ie general or snaps. Why not use ‘home’ or the name of your local park as a keyword - so you can use the same method for all pics , ie where, what who.

Inside ‘what’ I have folders like ‘Event’ for birthdays etc, and folder called ‘holidays’ with keywords specific for them, this is alongside the standard ‘animals’ birds, trees flowers landscapes etc etc
 
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Tagging is definitely something that I need to get better at. I used to add names of people, but since Lightroom started recognising faces I've relied on that instead - I should probably use that tool to go through and add tags for all of the people. [Edit] Today I learned that it does apply these as tags - result! [/edit] I also have a smart collection in Lightroom that collates all of my untagged photos, unfortunately there are quite a lot.

As we are still at the start of the year, and I haven't added much to Lightroom, I am going to create a smart collection for "untagged in 2025" and make sure that I tag everything.
 
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tagging photos is not something I do - I save images off the camera into folders on a dedicated drive with descriptive titles and dates and build a 'directory' of my images so, top level country, then year, then month, then date, if specific as a subject eg its a fungi walk then location and fungi as the final folder name - or just date and location if generic photos as lowest directory level so it looks like this - f:\france\2024\02 february\20022024 laForge. I find I can recall the actual date/location and if not I can recall close enought to find things easily with minimum reviews of folders
 
I'm with Elliot and Mark: give the image a sensible file name and use the file name search facility in modern operating systems to find what you're looking for, when you want it.

I've tried these specialist databases and they take too long to set up and too much trouble to search, for my needs.
 
All my photos are broken down into categories. Landscape, Portrait, Street etc.

1st pass they get that category tag.

I have Smart collections in LR to look for photos without that category tag so I can just do them when I'm ready. Then I have smart collections for each category which means I can tag in groups. Each photo gets a name tag (if it's a person or pet) and then three words picked from a sentence I'd use to describe the photo.

Once I've finished keywording, I give them a green label. The smart collections all then remove the photos so I know exactly how many images I have that are keyworded and what's still to do. It makes it a progressive task I can do when I feel like it rather than an overwhelming job that gets out of hand. There's also a mild dopamine hit when you reduce a category to "done".

This is how mine looks today...

Screenshot 2025-01-13 155810.png

Finding a photo of a cat in a tree, or a rose, or a portrait of daughter #1, or something red is dead easy. As well as "find all my 1* or better photos of a church".

I'm not sure if LR Classic still allows it, but you used to be able to not pay the sub and still have access to the Library module where all this is done. Once it's keyworded, you can CTRL+S to save the metadata back to the raw/jpeg files (rather than it being in the cat) and when you load it into your DAM software of choice they will pop back up again.
 
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is there much benefit? perhaps the solution is to have a better filing system? i file into year then event/occation tagging the folder with the date so that they fall into each year sequentially but it depends what you do and how good your memory is or if you want to batch find photos to export?

It seems like a bit of a long winded job for little beneft for me personally but thats not to say it would be the same for someone else - how often are you going to search for "flowers"?- is it going to take more time to find the images you are after than the cumulative time you spend tagging everything? Maybe if you have 500,000 photos but otherwise i am not sure?

For me, as i shoot cars - it is important to be able to quickly find specific cars at an event so for that Ive been using an AI plugin called anyvision - perhaps try that?
 
For me, I enter competitions. If I need an image of say a model in red taken after 2018 and it must be a finally edited TIFF file (I use a green code for this). I would use Keyword portrait and Keyword Red, plus dates after 2018 and colour code Green. To undertake a search of all of my 35,000 images, it would take many hours possibly days using Adobe Bridge but less than half a second using LR Classic. The idea of finding specific images manually does no strike me as feasible as it would also rely a lot on my memory over say 20 years.

Dave
 
I use LR Classic and keywords rather than collections. It is not that difficult to keyword family occasions.
 
A_S said:
is there much benefit
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As you say, it depends on your memory and ability to file things logically, as well as what you're doing photographically.

I have digital photos going back to 2006, not to mention neg scans going back to the 80s. I have zero hope of finding anything over about 5 years old using the year. I frown when someone asks me what year I got married. It's an age thing. Keywording now might be something your older self will thank you for.

If I want to see all the pictures of daughter #1, I can just search on that keyword in LR and they all appear, no matter what I filed them under or when I took them.
If I want pics of Yosemite, I search for that, because as I sit here, I have no clue what year it was.

I also make a lot of zines and books. Finding collections of images is very useful to me. A book on "Lone Trees"? One click and I have all my images in one place. Easy to curate down to final images, and easy to organise. Did a book for the outlaws a few years ago showing our girls growing up. Took me 5 minutes to get all the images in one place, an hour or so to curate it down and a couple of minutes to export them all to a folder ready to start doing the book layout.

Yes. It's a tedious job, but staying on top of it once it's done takes a few minutes. For me - it's worth it.
 
Harlequin565 said:
As you say, it depends on your memory and ability to file things logically, as well as what you're doing photographically.

I have digital photos going back to 2006, not to mention neg scans going back to the 80s. I have zero hope of finding anything over about 5 years old using the year. I frown when someone asks me what year I got married. It's an age thing. Keywording now might be something your older self will thank you for.

If I want to see all the pictures of daughter #1, I can just search on that keyword in LR and they all appear, no matter what I filed them under or when I took them.
If I want pics of Yosemite, I search for that, because as I sit here, I have no clue what year it was.

I also make a lot of zines and books. Finding collections of images is very useful to me. A book on "Lone Trees"? One click and I have all my images in one place. Easy to curate down to final images, and easy to organise. Did a book for the outlaws a few years ago showing our girls growing up. Took me 5 minutes to get all the images in one place, an hour or so to curate it down and a couple of minutes to export them all to a folder ready to start doing the book layout.

Yes. It's a tedious job, but staying on top of it once it's done takes a few minutes. For me - it's worth it.
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Yeah I wasn't meant to be critical of anyones way of doing things. Obviously scale is relative and 35,000 pictures in @Dave Canon 's archive since 2006 to me is quite small - thats just under 1900 a year - I took 6000 yesterday and last year (After culling 2/3 aprox) I took circa 65,000 and in those circumstances its cost/time/benefit argument comes into play.

johnrellis.com

Any Vision – John R. Ellis Lightroom Plugins

Use Google AI to tag and search Lightroom photos with objects, activities, custom descriptions and classifications, landmarks, logos, embedded text (OCR).
johnrellis.com johnrellis.com


I would try any vision though. It takes a bit of reading since the upgrade but basically its about $0.019 dollers per 1000 photos and it will pretty much tag what you want from car numbers and registrations for me, to locations, objects, items, brands, landmarks for other people. Here is what i was playing with a couple of days ago to set the new version up. Look at my prompt on the left and the output on the right:


excuse the quality I've deleted the original and copying and pasting from a whatsapp chat!anyyvision.jpg
 
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I use Digikam for DAM.
You will need to think carefully about the keywords you use, make them hierarchical.
You will rearrange the keywords, but that will be easy when required.
 
I have tagged the photos I have created to date although I did later realise some of my tags (e.g. year, the camera I used) ended up being uncessary as I could filter on those using the EXIF data and so I was adding keywords uncessarilly for those. I do sometimes worry whether I have used tags inconsistently (e.g. football or U14football) for photographing my son's matches. But I am slowly getting over that worry as I can just search on all things containing 'football'

I have been a bit inconsistent on using location and I should really. As often one might recall where you took a photo
 
I'm a serial tagger... this is made easier and more necessary as I'm almost exclusively a film photographer. The exif data says my photos were created by a Noritsu or a Plustek camera! So I tag at least camera, lens, film, developer, and anything else relevant. I'll admit the latter is patchy; so I'll use location a lot when the photo was not taken nearby, but that might be Edinburgh or it might be Scotland etc. I do try to tag anything which at the time I think might be useful. And if I find a photo by other means and discover it wasn't tagged that way, I'll add the tag. Most of the first set of tags just happen the once (in C1Pro) after I've selected all the photos from that roll of film.
 
A_S said:
is there much benefit? perhaps the solution is to have a better filing system? i file into year then event/occation tagging the folder with the date so that they fall into each year sequentially but it depends what you do and how good your memory is or if you want to batch find photos to export?
Click to expand...
This is how I've done it up until now but the problem I'm having is that my photos now span 23 years it's more difficult to remember exactly when some photos were taken, increasingly I re-discover photos I'd forgotten I'd taken. Ideally if all my photos were tagged I'd be able to easily find any photos I was looking for, as an example say I wanted to find pictures of a car I owned - there's no specific album for my car photos so they'll be mixed in with others but I'd need to do some digging to try and find them. Whereas if I had it tagged I could just put the name and get the photos.

I have started tagging now while processing images and it takes a matter of seconds to add the tags, it's going to take time to add tags to older photos but I think it would be worth it.
 
I aim to do it all for the year before the year is out. I have never achieved this. It's now past mid-January and I have 1500 from 2024 to tag still.

It's tedious, so gets left. But worthwhile as it's the only way to find stuff five years down the line.
 
Interesting to read how others tackle this. I have always put into folders by date with a meaningful word e.g 2025-01-10beach but a few years back I invested in Photo Mechanic so that I could find my photos more easily. I've gone back and keyworded most now. I can search and find photos going back to about 2006 if I want to and it will tell me on what drive they are located. I do a catalog per year and you can choose which catalogs you want to search - all of them at once if you want.

When I import photos I add generic tags for all of them e.g. Spain, Extremadura, birds and then later when I have time I might go through and tag them more individually.

The only trouble is, I've now moved to a new Mac and I believe Photo Mechanic Plus won't run on that without me forking out a lot more money - grrr! So for the moment my database is on my old Mac which is not ideal, but at least the keywords are all in xmp files.
 
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