Keyword tagging philosophy (locations)

[wombat2010]

Peter (although I welcome responses from everyone), I noticed in your book that many of your pictures do not include any location keywords, but some do.  For example, on pages 14, 43, 52, and 62 you include at least some location keywords.  I have two questions about this:

1.  What criteria do you use to decide whether to include location keywords?  I imagine it has to do with how important the location is to the shot, or to how likely you are to do a future search based on that location--you may be more likely to search for China pictures than hometown pictures because of the sheer numbers.

2.  On images for which you do not include location as a keyword, do you always/never/sometimes input the location (and/or city, state) in that IPTC/XMP field?  I imagine it is easier to search keywords in most catalonging programs than it is to search other IPTC/XMP fields, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

I am organizing personal photographs, many of which are family pictures, so to the extent you operate differently depending on whether the images are work or personal . . . well, I'd actually like to hear both methods anyway.

It seems obvious to me to put in the keyword "Alaska" and maybe even "Fairbanks" and "Chena Hot Springs" on pictures I took on a recent trip.  What is less obvious is whether to put location keywords for places I go all the time.  I guess it comes down to personal preferences (as do a lot of things in the tagging world), and whether a term is really going to help narrow a future search in a meaningful way.

I look forward to hearing different peoples' strategies; I may post future threads on the topic of tagging, such as how many words from the same hierarchy people include as keywords (e.g., "Name" or Family, Immediate Family, Siblings, "Name"?).

Thank you.

Stephen

[peterkrogh]

Stephen,
It also depends on who you are keywording FOR.  So, if I am just adding keywords so that I can find the image, I will go a bit light on the keywording: often 3 or 4 is all an image will ever need. 

If I am keywording so that an image can be found by a user in an anonymous search, then I would want to be much more thorough.  Since only a very small percentage of images will ever be available for anonymous searches, I don't have to do this to most of my files.

BTW, I try to always use the City and State in the IPTC Image panel.  So the location may not be in the keywords, but may still be in the metadata.
Peter

[danaltick]

I make a point to put the location in both the keywords and the location field, and I am using the Image Information Toolkit with the Controlled Vocabulary for all my keywording.  I agree with Peter though, this is probably overkill, but I'm doing it primarly to form the habit and become familiar with a controlled vocabulary, and it is somewhat automated (copy and paste).  I do however remove some of the terms that I feel are not really relavent.  It is kind of nice for example for my zoo shots to do a search on "bear" and get "animal, animals, bear, beast, beasts, creature, creatures, mammals, undomesticated, wildlife, zoology"; albeit that's overkill probably but at least it's controlled and consistent and future-proof...and somewhat automated.  However, I have not had jobs that even approach the size of Peter's, so this may become more trouble than it's worth if and when that happens, but at least I'll be familiar with it.

Dan

[AlanDunne]

Stephen,

I sometime use the keyword to indicate a generic location, and then the IPTC location, city, state fields to be specific. For example I would have a keyword for "zoo" and the location/city/state fields set to "Metropolitan Toronto Zoo"/"Toronto"/"Ontario" or similar.

Cheers ... Alan