Comments on: News orgs have forgotten that people really love photos

By: Journalism Iconoclast: News organisations - make more use of photos | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

Tue, 05 May 2009 09:04:06 +0000

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By: John Zhu

John Zhu — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:26:11 +0000

@Pat, when I said time-consuming, I was specifically referring to names of people in a picture. Obviously most tags would take little time; that’s what makes them worthwhile and that’s also why they work best for more general subjects. I agree w/ trying to offload some of the work to the community, but the difference b/n a newspaper photo site and Facebook is that on FB, it’s no one’s responsibility to tag a photo. Whether you tag someone in a picture or not results in relatively little benefit for any of the parties involved. If it doesn’t get tagged, no big deal. If you’re a newspaper running a photo site, esp. one where you’re trying to sell photos, then it does matter whether a picture is properly tagged, and that responsibility ultimately falls back on you. Any community help is a bonus. Like anything else in life, if you want to do it right, you’ll have to put time into it.

By: pat

pat — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:31:21 +0000

@John,

It shouldn’t be that time consuming to tag the photos. Most of the tagging would be a batch process. Every single photo in my above hypothetical would be a part of a photo gallery for that football game. Thus, every photo in that gallery would automatically get the tags “football,” “Kenston High School”, Lincoln High School,” and “September 28, 2009.”

The only time consuming part would be tag who is in each shot. That might be a better job for the community. If we can some how offload some of this tagging and caption work to the community, it would save a tremendous amount of time. And it has worked pretty well for Facebook so far.

By: John Zhu

John Zhu — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:25:53 +0000

@Pat, I think the tagging system you are imagining would do the job. Ideally, that would be the kind of system I want. But regardless of whether it’s done with tags, captions, or any other search field, achieving that level of specificity will invariably eat up a lot of time. That’s why I like your idea of wikipedia-style captions from the community, which will help alleviate some of that burden. Maybe wait two weeks after you’ve uploaded pictures for an event, let the community fill in some of the blanks, and then have your staff go back and do what’s left. I’m guessing your staff will still be doing the bulk of the work, though not as much.

By: pat

pat — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:06:12 +0000

@John,

I think the tagging system would have to be fairly robust, otherwise the problem you bring up would be quite annoying.

Let’s say Lincoln High School played Kenton High School on September 28, 2009 in a football game. Under the system I am envisioning, you’d be able to search for tags like, “Lincoln High School,” “Kenston High School,” “Joe Smith,” (a player in said photo) “football,” “September 28, 2009″ and more.

This way if you knew the date or event, you can then search for your kid in just that event or on that date. We certainly have to allow people to narrow down photo searches. This way you can sort photos by event, date, person, etc and by a combination of each.

A weak tagging system would make this a nightmare. How about a robust tagging system plus the ability to allow wikipedia-like captions from our community?

By: John Zhu

John Zhu — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:57:21 +0000

I agree with most of the stuff on here, though I think there is some value in photo-specific captions in terms of helping make it easier to find specific people/subjects, especially if you are going to start building a giant database of photos. Tags are great, but if I were a parent of a high school athlete, it would be handy to be able to search for my kids’ names to find pics of them without having to go through all the pics from every game that you shot.