dariusz grabka

Introducing Flickr Search Tagging!

It’s a little utility that enables a couple of things:

1. Let’s you to propose tags for images that don’t belong to you on Flickr. Contributing tags if you want to help describe the image is often not possible, unless: you’re the owner, you’re a contact of the owner, or the person has allowed very permissive tagging rights.
2. Keeps your search queries around the tagging area. Queries are valuable, because you as a user took the time to contribute that text at some point. Now you can leverage that same text when you want to tag an image.
3. Tag your images with the proposed tags, or delete the proposed tags.

If this sounds novel and useful, it is :) Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to prove in my thesis.

Installation

In order to do any of this, you need to:

1. Be using Firefox 1.5+, Flock, and any other browser that can run Greasemonkey 0.6+. This is an untested claim :-)
2. Install Greasemonkey in Firefox, if you don’t have it installed already.
3. Install my magical script: Flickr Search Tagging UserScripts.org

What happens to my contributed tags?

They get stored on a server (atthelib.com), attached to a timestamp, your Flickr account name, and the identifier of the photo you are tagging.

In terms of privacy and control of the tags: there is very little. This whole process is using the “Wikipedia approach”: everyone can contribute. The owner of the image can delete a contributed tag. A deleted, contributed tag cannot be re-added. There are some anti-spam measures, including limits to how many tags can be proposed at one time, in one day, from one location, and so on.

Anywho, this is an alpha release, so any and all feedback is most welcome (feel free to use the comment form below)! This is part of a Master’s thesis, so for now all rights and copyrights are strictly reserved.

Screenshot