Whenever you add photos to a service people automatically assume tagging will be a feature. I don’t know about you, but I think photo tags suck. My brain isn’t well enough organized to be like a database, remembering all the tags I’ve used in the past and which images I applied them to. So, for now no photo tagging.
Even if you had perfect tagging then you would run into semantic problems when you are in a group. A word means one thing to me and means a different thing to others yet we use the same word.
This weekend I was taking photos of the kids getting ski race medals and after taking a picture with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 app it would prompt me to tag the image. I defaulted to date as I found after I took a picture the last thing I wanted to do is tag an image and type. Seems really stupid that my kids are smiling in the moment and I would have my head down pecking on my phone. Doing it later is too painful, and you are spending time sharing the photos with family and friends.
This experience confirmed a better way to tag that came from a friend who was using a new photo based service and made an awesome point. Sorry not sharing the idea. It is too good. Especially since I have been staring at this problem for over 2 years. With patience and identifying that photo tagging sucks, finding a better way is the reward for the years of patience.
Photo tagging is important enough that Facebook was granted a patent for photo tagging.
Facebook Wins Patents For Tagging in Photos, Other Digital Media
Tagging was arguably the feature that made Facebook the biggest photo site in the world and seeded the idea for creating the platform.
Now the company has finally won a patent for it.
Nearly five years after the company originally filed for the invention, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gave Facebook a patent protecting the ability to select a region in a piece of media (like a photo or video) and associate people or other entities with it. Mark Zuckerberg, longtime designer-turned-product architect Aaron Sittig and former Facebook engineer Scott Marlette were credited as inventors.
Zuckerberg has long talked about photo tagging as the innovation that helped him and other early Facebook employees initially conceive of the idea for the platform. The company did a competitive analysis of all other photo products out on the web and while Facebook didn’t offer features like high resolution or printing, it still outcompeted rivals simply because it centered its product around people, and not around technical capabilities. Last year the company said it was seeing more than 100 million photo uploads a day. It has not updated that statistic since.
Zuckerberg has long talked about photo tagging as the innovation that helped him and other early Facebook employees initially conceive of the idea for the platform. The company did a competitive analysis of all other photo products out on the web and while Facebook didn’t offer features like high resolution or printing, it still outcompeted rivals simply because it centered its product around people, and not around technical capabilities. Last year the company said it was seeing more than 100 million photo uploads a day. It has not updated that statistic since.