Flickr really went to town with its automatically generated tags for my photo today. The photo was of star anise, which I took for the Challenge Friday Group; this week’s challenge is stars. A straightforward, simple photo of the spice, I thought but Flickr read a lot more into it.
This is the photo:
And these are the tags:
The ones at the top with the grey background are the tags that I assigned to the photo. The rest are Flickr’s.
I deleted several of them before I thought of taking a screenshot for posterity but what is left gives you a flavour of the range of concepts that Flickr feels are relevant. Some of them I agree with (pattern, star shape, symmetry). Others I shall delete as they are of no help to anyone searching on them (foliage, leaf, landscape, tree, forest, blossom, pastel).
I do, though, rather like “minimalism” even though the structure and complexity of flavour and aroma of star anise is far from minimalist. It stays.
not sure why you deleted all the extra tags… if I was doing a search for, say, leaf images, I might choose your image for my art project. That’s a fuzzy search, not directly informational, but still useful.
Ah – interesting, alternative view of the purpose of tags, and the potential use of the image. I tag many of these images primarily from the viewpoint of a scientist, and in no way is star anise a leaf. So, that tag and some of the others – it is definitely not a landscape or a forets – were deleted.