Tagging things or thinging tags?
Vista’s photo manager has a built in tagging facility. Yay!
But I couldn’t figure out how to apply tags to photos until I checked the built-in help. The photo manager shows you your photos on the right and your list of tags on the left. I kept trying to drag tags onto the photos. Nope. You have to drag your photos onto your tags.
This strikes me as weird. It’s less convenient because when you drag a photo, you are dragging a translucent image of the photo, which makes it a little hard to see the list over which you’re dragging it. It’s do-able, but it’s not as easy as dragging a little bit of text onto a great big image.
So, why would Microsoft design it this way? All I can figure is that the designers were thinking that tags are like categories: Bins into which things go. For most of us, however, tags are labels that get attached to things. It works either way, but the “containment” metaphor seems inappropriate for tags… [Tags: tagging vista categories taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Actually there is a lot easier way. In the right side of the photos there should be a pane where you can add tags and ratings to one or several photos. If you don’t see the pane you can open it by right clicking an image and choosing add tag (I’m not sure of the exact phrasing since I use a localized version).
Marika, I saw the right-hand pane, but it only had a box for creating new tags (and for rating the photos). The list of created tags was on the left.
When you start to write in the box the autocomplete feature suggests possible tags and the dropdown also remembers your recently used tags. For me it’s very easy and fast to use, I never even thought about dragging since I use multi-layered hierarchical tags.
I haven’t seen the pane Marika described yet (I don’t have Vista). I would do it as a pane with tickboxes (can be multi-layered, and can be searched/filtered), and when a non-existent tag is searched for, offer to create the tag as a tickbox.
I don’t know how to cue the user that they can drag tags to form heirarchy.
In June referenced your comments about tags on IT Conversations when I wrote about Google’s just-released Docs & Spreadsheets interface using folderish tabs (or tabbish folders?) here:http://systematic.hrblogs.org/2007/06/27/folder-tag-mashups-with-muscle-at-google/
Interestingly, Steve Clayton of Microsoft commented about Vista’s implemetation of tags being “massively underused”.
Personally I’m less interested in the mechanics of specific implementations than I am about the blurring of purpose and functionality between the two, is this a good thing, bad thing or evolution?
And interesting that other cheap-ish apps (where cheap-ish means significantly cheaper than photoshop) do both, but see tag onto picture as primary – the help text for PaintShop Pro, for example, reads:
To assign a keyword tag to one or more images
1. Select the thumbnail, or thumbnails, that you want to tag.
2. From the left side of the Organizer, drag the tag onto the selected thumbnail or thumbnails.
• You can also assign a tag to one or more images by dragging the selected thumbnail or thumbnails onto the tag. In addition, you can assign tags to selected thumbnails by clicking the Image Information button on the Organizer toolbar and clicking the Apply button .
To delete a keyword tag
iPhoto uses the same metaphor for albums -ie you drag photos onto albums.However, as you rightly say, an album is a ‘container’ . (However, I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of dragging big transluscent things onto small text areas$. I guess microsoft ‘borrowed’ the idea from iPhoto ?