How Not to Design Tagging

Berin Loritsch — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:17:00 +0000

Adobe Photoshop Elements provides “visual tagging” to make organizing your photos easier. Once the tags are created, using the tags is pretty cool. The problem is the process of tagging. First, let’s consider the parts they’ve done correctly:

You can organize, rename, and annotate your tags
Tags include a photo, which is automatically assigned the first time you use it
You can have several tags on each picture

Now, what’s wrong with that? Nothing if you can accept the limitations of assigning tags. Yes you can select several photos at once and assign the same tag to all the pictures, which can save some time. But to add each and every tag you have to go through this sequence of events:

Right click on the photo in the organizer
Navigate to the “Attach Tag” sub-menu
Navigate to the tag you want through your tag hierarchy

Now, imagine going through this process after photographing your son’s basketball game. I’d like to be able to give a set of photos to his teammates and the cheerleaders, but to do that I have to tag each picture with who’s in it. Any picture will have between 1 and 5 teammates or up to the whole cheerleader squad (about a dozen girls). The pictures are in the order they were taken throughout the game, so they aren’t neatly grouped based on who is in the pictures (unlike family outings). To top it off, each game has over 100 pictures with some around 200 pictures. Imagine going through your collection and organizing things by tag in this situation. My hierarchy has People->Team->person and People->Cheerleaders->person. The event tags are not a problem, as are the subject tags. It’s the people tags.

So, since complaining without thinking how it could be better is useless, let me describe how things can be better: Flickr Organizer. Using the Flickr Organizer, I can grab any arbitrary selection of pictures with some nice search features to find the ones I want. I can then easily add the same set of tags to all the photos in that collection. That’s right—set of tags. Not one tag at a freakin’ time. I can then clear my working group, and set up a new one. It’s not perfect, but it is much better than what I have to do for Adobe Organizer.

Maybe that was a little too trite. What can we do within the confines of the Adobe Organizer app? The three things I mentioned at the top are good things. They help after the tags are assigned, and offer some advantages over online tagging applications. I just don’t want to navigate a complex menu hierarchy to assign one tag. In fact, I don’t want to navigate a menu hierarchy at all. What should happen then?

I type a keyboard shortcut (which would be for the right-click menu option “Attach Tags…”
A small dialog box pops up with key focus on the tag entry text box.
The entry box has type-ahead so I can select the tag as the list narrows
I can add as many tags as I want at one time
When I click “Apply” or some equivalent button, all the tags I selected are applied
If I create a whole new tag, the dialog will let me add it to a category later. This allows the set of tags to grow naturally, yet still maintain order.

When I have to add 12 tags, this will be a real time saver. It will even save time when I only need to add one. Right clicking and navigating a menu hierarchy requires a lot of mouse movements, and sometimes the menu opens to the right and sometimes the menu opens to the left. Sometimes the mouse goes outside the menu, and I have to start all over again. With a dialog box that allows me to add one or more tags at once, I only have to worry about one thing—and since focus will automatically be on the tag entry box I won’t need to move my mouse at all. After all, tab order will let me get to the button I want which will save me time as well.

Just a Thought...: How Not to Design Tagging

How Not to Design Tagging