Why didn’t anyone tell me…

My theory of photograph tagging could use some cosolidationg and criticism. Here’s what I do now.

“Where is that picture of Lisa and I on the beach the day we went to see the butterflies?”

Observe the following from this sample:

Lisa and I

Subjects. Obvious tags.

on the day

This was apparently a day-trip, which I think of differently than vacation-trips (multi-day trips in my world).

on the beach

Where we went while on the day trip. This could be good caption material or maybe a tag.

to see the butterflies?

This is a real winner – butterflies would make a really obvious thing to search for. But should it be a tag or a caption? Not sure yet, just tucking it away for now.

So the next time I field this question, I can think of no less than 5 bits of text to search for, and the intersection of these 5 should get me a very small subset of things to pick from. The tags on my photos tend to read very similar to the captions in some ways.

There is also another aspect to this. I often remember which kind of camera I had at the time of the requested photo, so I can also query the EXIF tags for that. Sometimes I will remember a year or year range and can limit on that as well. And being a photography weenie, I can sometimes remember which lens it was and add that. You’d really have to stump me to find a picture that I had to set ALL these options to find though.

So what do you think? What solution do you use?