Monday, April 04, 2016

Flickr’s Autotagging

20160403_MG_3452-Cheeky_PossumI have been impressed with flickr’s autotagging of photos, It is much more precise than google photos’s search groupings. My thought was always that the google photo system should give the user the ability to flag their photos and say for example this is not a cat However I could never find such and option. Up to now I had not felt inclined to try and correct flirks system, which occurs as you load the photo, Today when I went to remove a couple of tags incorrectly allocated to this photo of a ring tail possum, which flickr had tag as a cat and a pet, and the lattice fencing it is peering through as a photo border, I found I could not delete the autotags. So flickr is also missing the opportunity to have users help improve their classification.

image Flickr was a very earlier introducer of keyword tagging and you can have up to 75 tags, This helps both yourself and others find the themes in photos. The introduction of autotagging happened last yeast and these tags are differentiates by being in a white box with a grey outline. Whereas the tags you add are shown in a grey box. To remove a tag you just hover the mouse over it and a X shows up on the right hand side, clicking on it then deletes the tag. The issue I discovered today that this  while this works on your tags (the grey boxed tags) it does not work on the the autotags (white boxed tags)

PS: Just a day after I posted the above obserbvation the ability to deleted auto tags has returned. It probably only went away last week. However judging my the help forum thread a lot of other users noticed it as well. I appluad the flickr team for respondng quickly. Unfortunate the forum post associate this with a possible drop in the performance of correctly classifing photo, but I must admit I find it hard to believe that this might be cased by users deleting miss classified photo, I think that should improve classification.

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