dummied

Search the metadata, not the photo

At a glance

This entry was written on February 27, 2007.

The entry prior to this is entitled Media Temple, Rails and Mint.

The entry following this is entitled Metadata magic act.

There are 0 comments on this post.

This entry has been tagged as Newspapers, Recommended, Work, metadata, photos.

Archives are also available.

In newsrooms across the country, we’ve already figured out how to quickly search and manage copious amounts of photos. Photo desks around the world plug right into the AP feed and have a universe of photos at their fingertips.

Add in all the staff-generated photos and the whole experience becomes one of those gleeful new-journalist touchstone moments, along with surfing the wire for the first few times. Every photo in the world (practically) at your fingertips.

How do we sort or find our needles in this giant haystack? Well, we “tag” everything. We tag photos as sports, business, entertainment. We tag photos with the photographer’s name. We tag photos with the date taken and with story slugs. And we caption everything.

In the end, we don’t search for “all the baseball photos”, we search for all the photos tagged as baseball or with the word “baseball” in the caption.

Moving your newsroom’s photos onto the web in any cohesive, meaningful manner (and yes, I’m looking at you, pop-up slideshows) involves the same principles. A computer (with a few in-development exceptions) can’t look at a photo and say, “Hey, that’s Derek Jeter, he’s a baseball player and that’s a sport.”

But photographers, photo editors and, yes, users can.

Any one of those can fill “Derek Jeter”, “sports” and “baseball” into a keywords field or write a caption with all those phrases in it. Stick all that metadata into a publicly-accessible database, map the records to the photo files themselves and you have a solid foundation for whatever construction project you want (including those infernal pop-up slideshows if your page-view-hungry bosses insist).

And don’t stop with the obvious stuff we’re doing already. Why not tag photos with a community? Or multiple communities? Or teams? Or schools? Or full geocoded locations (ever want to find all the photos from five miles around your house … give photographers GPS-enabled cameras … just as soon as they develop good ones …)?

And in the end, the more metadata an image has – the more searchable stuff an image has – the better your search is going to be. The more images you have – the more possible results to slice, dice and rearrange – the better your search is going to be.

And the better the search, the more quickly you can come to the realization that the high school game gallery you just put online is just a search for all the high school basketball photos between TeamA and TeamB from yesterday …

Which is probably how you found the photos in the first place …