Flickr tagging – it’s not bad, it’s cool

I’m gradually working my way through the ~5000 photos from HackDay in London on Flickr, to see if there’s anything interesting that I’d missed. So far I’ve found a number of pictures of our team’s hack on stage, the planning process, the blueprint, the team hacking… all stuff that I failed to get a decent photo of.

The slightly irritating part is that people don’t always have their photos opened up for general tagging and notes. Where I can, I add tags to list the people I know in the photo, and even add a note to mark them out. Unfortunately, this setting is not the default on Flickr – the standard is to allow only your contacts to add tags. I also just found that many of my own photos were not marked as open for tags and notes.

Stephanie Booth recently wrote about this on her blog, and included a tutorial on how to change the setting.

I decided to try, and it works. And you do retain control in case somebody does something stupid (happened to me… maybe once?)

So, I’ve opened up my HackDay photos for general tagging and I’m going to go back and change the setting on other sets too.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, HackDay, hackdaylondon, photography, photos, folksonomy, tagging