Tagging images - What tagwords to use? + Short technical explanation -

(I wondered about where to put this, and think this might be the best place)

I am now up to the point where I'm going to tag all of my photographs (about 3k).

Technical aspect/explanation:

- EXIF is already there, seeing as that is written by camera. EXIF-info contains shutterspeed, aperture, time and date of the image and so on. Mainly it's not meant to be changed.
- IPTC is a pretty old standard it seems (1979 I read). It is used for adding tags and descriptions, like "horse, riding, sport, animal".
- XMP is newer, and based on XML. Seems to do about the same as IPTC, but I get the impression that it's the new open standard for metadata for images.

Read here for more on EXIF vs IPTC if that is still unclear.

I use Picasa to sort out images on disk, and upload them to flickr to store and show them online.

When tagging an image in Picasa, IPTC is used. flickr supports IPTC. You can try it yourself: Tag an image with something in Picasa, then use Uploadr for instance. And you can already see it being tagged with the tag or tags from Picasa.

Picasa and flickr both support IPTC and EXIF, but not XMP it seems.

What I have decided to do is just going for IPTC right now, and hoping and mailing about XMP-support. Getting flickr and Picasa to write tags in both IPTC and EXIF would be awesome, and I expect that either they, or someone externally will build a tool to do this when the time comes.

Note: There seem to be formats that XMP and IPTC don't support. Should think XMP supports more, like RAW.

If you have any questions about this, then Google Inc. has a great searchengine, or you could make your own thread linking back to this one.

"Linguistical" aspect:

But what to use as tagwords/tags?

This is my question in this thread. I thought I'd just add some information that I would like to have had approximately yesterday.

Seeing as virtually none of my images are tagged (I have them sorted by year/month/event on disk. Pretty good system it seems. Please come with suggestions that improve it. (and thanks to the person, possibly on this forum) that wrote about this, and which gets the most creds for me using it).

So I want to have a good convention on what I use as tags before I start.

Things I've thought about:

• Places - Tagging with places if relevant. For example: Louvre, Paris, France
  
• People - Names if I know them. Just came to think of: Could have things like "old man" if I take photographs of people I don't know.
  
• Black-and-white - I first dueled them with Google ("bw": 51M, "b/w": 14,2 M, "b&w": 17,3), but then I looked at the Wikipedia-article, seeing as there are often synonyms written in bold at the top of the article. There I found what I'm probably going to use: monochrome (which "allows" me to tag sepia (Bob forbid) and other similar effects)
  
• Animals - Hm, probably something like "dog, Oscar" if the name was Oscar. Maybe also the latin name if I knew it.
  
• Plants - Pretty much the same. (What? You don't give your plants names?)
  
• Emotions - Possibly. But this is where it starts getting shaky. If I do a theme or shoot or whatever on sadness, I might tag them with "sad", but doing this to all images containing people?...
  
• Cars - Brand and model I should think

tl;dnr? Quite understandable ^^

In short: What kind of words should I tag my images with to be consistent? How do you do this?