Tagging Images

I got really excited when I saw TagCow, a site which uses Mechanical Turk to tag images in the thousands, but was then disappointed when I realised that the tagging only applied to images on their site. What I really want is a similar service where I could upload thumbnails of my images to get tagged but then have the tags incorporated into those images' meta data on my own hard drive. I am pretty good at tagging but with 8,000 images and growing it is a daunting task!

Comments

[ditdotdat]

But isn't the point of Mechanical Turk that you use it to pay poor people a pittance to do tedious jobs? You've probably already got poor people available in your household in the form of cash-hungry children. Why not make them do the tagging for you? In fact, someone needs to write a little front-end so you can make children do image tagging and pretend it's a social networking activity. Safe and productive.

[Adrian McEwen]

That does sound like a great idea, but you're right - I don't want to put all my photos into yet another silo. It's interesting how they're claiming to "make your photos yours again"... :-)

[Michael Droz]

Hi all,

This is Michael Droz, co-founder of tagcow.com. Just a couple of responses to questions you have.

1. We're trying very hard to avoid becoming yet another silo for your photo archive. We see ourselves as being a "value added" network that your images only pass through as they head to a destination - Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug or your desktop. We currently have the Flickr integration completed and are working on the others.

2. As for Mechanical Turk and paying poor people to tag photos it's not what you think. We surveyed our users and 75% of them are from the U.S. And those that are in poorer nations really appreciate the work. They consider it to be good work and good pay. While TechCrunch indicated the hourly wage of our workers was $1.20 they didn't talk at all about how the unique toolset that we provide our taggers has the ability to increase their productivity and thus increase their wage. Our goal is to get wages up to our national minimum wage at the low end and even higher for more advanced specialized tagging.

3. How we claim to "make your photos yours again" well it's simple really. We consider photos without meta data to be lost or hidden from the owner. By adding meta data to photos we feel like we've shined a light on the photos and made them accessible to the owner. So in this way we believe we help make your photos yours again.

Feel free to ping me directly with more questions/comments, michael.droz@gmail.com.

Cheers,
Michael

[Euan W Semple]

Putting to once side other commenters' comments about silos and Mechanical Turk I still can't see how your service adds tags to the photos stored in iPhoto on my hard drive which is what I really want.