I need a common taxonomy for my tags by DAM News Staff

November 30, 2009

Photo organization: How Geoff does it | Photodoto.

Photodoto readerGeoff Coupe sent in some very helpful and detailed responses to my plea for help regarding myGreat Photo Organization Project (which is still proceeding although I haven’t updated the sidebar in a little while). Here are his excellent responses to my questions (and you can read more on his blog). Thanks, Geoff!

If you’ve got a great system for organizing and archiving your growing photo collection,share it in the comments or email me a guest post for publication here. Maybe we could make a regular series of it… Thanks!

Question: As soon as I tagged my second photo I realized that I need a common taxonomy for my tags. I can’t tag some photos “Bird” and others “Birds” and still others “Winged beasts.” I need to pick a definitive tag and use it for all of my photos. How do I decide? Should all tags be plural or singular? Does it matter? Also, while I’ll be the main user of the archive for now, one day my children or grandchildren will inherit my collection, so the tags will need to make sense to other people besides myself.

You’ve already had someone pointing you to the Controlled Vocabulary site, which is an excellent resource. While I don’t use the CVKC itself, I have based my vocabulary on a sample of the CVKC that ships with the DAM application that I use: IDimager. That, together with the CV of the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus forms the basis of my tag taxonomy. See my answer to your second question for more detail.