• Gallery2 Map Module – screencast | Will's Similiblog
  (tags: gallery mapping gps google)

I run two photo galleries; a hand-picked collection of my best photos over at Landscape Photography, and a general gallery of all my photos. I’ve just installed the Gallery2 tags module on them to make finding photos easier, so rather than having to search by only the names of the files or words in the description there are now clickable tags that can be added, the idea being to link related photos together.

Tagging photos is easy if the content of the photo is used for tags, rather than its location or other non-visual information. For example, the following image

Burnt out car

was taken in Wiltshire, and is of a burnt out car. The tags for the photo, however are

• trees
• frost
• road
• blue sky
• shadow
• car
• fire
• melting

since that’s what I can see in the photo. I can’t see ‘Wiltshire’ or even ‘car fire’ (because it’s not on fire – tags must be accurate for this to work), but I can see some trees, some blue sky, a bit of frost and the melted bit at the front of the car where the bumper used to be. Tagging photos this way is simple if I imagine trying to describe the photo to someone. Tags should also be generic and re-usable, their puprose is to link items together. Having thousands of tags, each with only one photo is no good, if I do that I may as well just write a really good description instead.