i've decided to use tags to describe the photos posted at smudo.org. as of this writing, i have only tagged the 100 or so most recently published photos. the reason for going public with tags, despite the effort being far from finished, is that i'd really fancy you thoughts about the idea as such. will tags do any good, or are they merely a way of cluttering my web site with useless information? any thoughts on this are highly appreciated.

here's a mini-faq;

why tags? the use of tags is a means to provide you with an at-a-glance overview of what's in my archives, it's simply an alternative to that of looking at the page containing the thumbnailed versions of all photos i've posted over the years.

where are the tags? they're situated in the information blurb located just beneath each photo. there's a link to all tags used at smudo.org, as well as to the archives for each indidual tag. if a tag is greyed out, it means there's only one photo associated with that particular tag, and that's the photo you're looking at.

how do you select tags? basically the first few phrases that spring into mind when i look at a photo. the tagging process is highly subjective, not at all consistent; there are photos that should perhaps have been tagged differently, and i continuously revise the tags. a mood thing if you will.

what's the difference between tags and categories? in my opinion, categories are things that should always be associated with a photo, in the case of smudo.org, it's things like camera and result. tags, on the other hand, are arbitrarily selected words or phrases that represent the essence or convey some additional information of a photo.