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Tagging, or using keywords on FA
3 years ago
How do you do it? What would you say should be the best practices?
My personal philosophy has always been to use separate and distinct words. When searching, you can encapsulate a phrase with double quotes to get an exact match. This way, you can add the tags cat, boy, girl to your image and still get hits regardless of if you search for "cat boy", or "cat girl" (using quotes). You can also get a hit if you search for only cat, boy, or girl (without quotes). It's flexible and effective. You'll get the hits if you don't use quotes, or even the full tag, with the tradeoff being a broader set of results.
The problem is that, while functional, this technique is predicated on your search knowledge, and using double quotes and other techniques is not something you can count on the general public to know about or use. To that end, I see artists separating single tags with an underscore (cat_boy and cat_girl), and sometimes not even separating them at all (catboy, catgirl). This allows for a more direct search, but the flexibility isn't there. Searching for cat and boy would not hit cat_boy or catboy.
This is weird. It feels as though we have several different sets of tags which isn't too big a deal, except that it has resulted in search sets that are mutually exclusive. A user searching for cat_boy would never see art tagged with cat and boy, and vice versa. It seems like the next best thing would be to tag with all three methods, but that will bloat the number of tags for any given piece and would likely surpass the 250 character limit for keywords.
It's a bit of a sticky situation. What are your thoughts?
My personal philosophy has always been to use separate and distinct words. When searching, you can encapsulate a phrase with double quotes to get an exact match. This way, you can add the tags cat, boy, girl to your image and still get hits regardless of if you search for "cat boy", or "cat girl" (using quotes). You can also get a hit if you search for only cat, boy, or girl (without quotes). It's flexible and effective. You'll get the hits if you don't use quotes, or even the full tag, with the tradeoff being a broader set of results.
The problem is that, while functional, this technique is predicated on your search knowledge, and using double quotes and other techniques is not something you can count on the general public to know about or use. To that end, I see artists separating single tags with an underscore (cat_boy and cat_girl), and sometimes not even separating them at all (catboy, catgirl). This allows for a more direct search, but the flexibility isn't there. Searching for cat and boy would not hit cat_boy or catboy.
This is weird. It feels as though we have several different sets of tags which isn't too big a deal, except that it has resulted in search sets that are mutually exclusive. A user searching for cat_boy would never see art tagged with cat and boy, and vice versa. It seems like the next best thing would be to tag with all three methods, but that will bloat the number of tags for any given piece and would likely surpass the 250 character limit for keywords.
It's a bit of a sticky situation. What are your thoughts?
When it comes to writing tags, I personally do what BricksnBones suggested: restrict tags based on the content of the piece (or sometimes the context, i.e. if it's an art piece made as part of a meme or trend), then use the extra characters to add tag variants where suitable.
As for splitting multi-word tags into seperate keywords, I only do it when the keywords apply to seperate searches.
To use your example, I would use "catboy" or "catgirl" as is relevant based on the contents of the piece, but then add "cat" and "boy"/"girl" as seperate tags so it appears when people are specifically looking for art containing cats or looking for art containing specifically males or females (or any other gender identification).
The only time I don't split mutli-word tags is when a single tag on it's own may refer to content not included in the associated artwork.
For content involving Breast Expansion, I use the terms "breastexpansion" and "be" due to their specificity, but I don't make "expansion" a tag as the phrase on it's own is typically associated with full-body or other body parts, not specifically breasts.
As for underscores, I did consider using them in the past (because it's much nicer to read "breast_expansion" than "breastexpansion") but I don't know if tags with underscores appear in searches without underscores and, much like your case with quotes, I don't have faith that common people would use underscores in their search terms.
(Also, fun fact, I think searches are sometimes based on the file name of the artwork/gifs/files you upload. One time I uploaded a commissioned piece where the commissioner requested that I don't mention their username anywhere in the upload (so it couldn't be traced back to them) but because I accidentally wrote their username into the file's name, the art appears if you search their username)
The methodology you're describing (regarding the case where you don't split) is more suited to a site with a proper tagging system (such as a booru) rather than a gallery with a search function. This is due to the tags on a booru being static - If you are ever unclear, you can search the tags themselves, find the one you want, and then apply that one to your search. Having subsets of tags would be redundant.
For a regular search, there isn't a defined list of search terms, so being generic is a higher priority. Using both the keywords "breast" and "expansion" would be ideal in this situation, as your art would show up for searches of "breast expansion", and generic searches of "expansion". All expansion may not be breast expansion, but all breast expansion is indeed expansion.
Generic and overlapping terms gets your art in front of more people, especially people who may not have yet decided what it is they're looking for. From that point, users can alter their search to "breast expansion" to narrow their scope, or alter their search to exclude only the "breast" part and continue refining. Ultimately, this process is about helping your stuff be more visible to people who may be interested but don't know to explicitly look for it. As long as you haven't tagged anything falsely, the responsibility of refining one's search terms is on the person doing the searching.
You used "be" as an example... While BE is used as an abbreviation for Breast Expansion, it's also a very common word and would be very difficult to search for on its own... And that isn't even mentioning that FA's search will discard words that are shorter than three characters. Good point on the file names, though... Any part of a submission could be visible, but I'd have no clue what. We need to understand the system we're working with in order to use it effectively.
...It's weird that I've ended up with what is effectively a discussion about SEO for furry artwork. It's good. Gets some rusty gears turning.