Every once in a while I come up with what I think would be a totally cool idea. Maybe one out of twenty of those times do I actually spring for it.
Flickr is amazing. It’s API is moderately impressive, too. I thought: “What if I could go through all the tags of all my favorite photos up on flickr, ordered them by popularity, then did a search for photos that matched the top X tags in that list?”
I expected to discover some incredible art that would be right in line with what I already enjoyed. BTW – what is it that I enjoyed?
First, I discovered that flickr can only handle searches up to 20 tags. Any more than that and you get back zip – zilch – nada. Doesn’t matter if any photo in their database actually contains all 21 tags – you get nothing back.
Second, I discovered that some people out there have over 150 tags on the photos of which only 2 tags might apply. As a result, when searching by relevance you get these over-tagged photos in the list along with the worthy ones.
Blame the upload tools. They don’t ask the user to tag each photo, but rather to list out all the tags used for the batch of photos being uploaded. Non-savvy users might batch upload a photograph of a donkey and another of a stop sign. Given only one box for all photos to list their tags they would enter something that places stop-sign related tags on the donkey and vice-versa.
All the same – try the tool out, it actually does a shot-gun result of what I hoped for. Try sorting by “interestingness, descending” for the most polished works first, then try the others for works that are “sleepers” (fantastic photos that are uploaded while people are dozing off, and therefore rarely discovered).