ajft

From the "Not quite the semantic web department" come a semi-standard use of Flickr's machine tags to label images with the genus and species.

For example, my photos of the Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), would be tagged with:

taxonomy:genus=Dacelo
taxonomy:binomial=Dacelo_novaeguineae

Hmm, I wonder if there are other conventions for kingdom, phylum, class, order and family?

References:

• http://pigsonthewing.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/triple-tags-on-twitter/

Continuing the conversation with myself — a possible sign of madness — and answering my own question from above, here are all the semi-standard taxonomy tags for the Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax):

"Aquila audax" "Wedge-tailed Eagle" bird taxonomy:kingdom=Animalia taxonomy:phylum=Chordata "taxonomy:class=Aves" "taxonomy:order=Falconiformes" "taxonomy:family=Accipitridae" "taxonomy:genus=Aquila" "taxonomy:species=audax" "taxonomy:common=Wedge-tailed Eagle" "taxonomy:binomial=Aquila_audax"

A text extract of the Australian bird list from wikipedia, a couple of minutes and a brief perl script and I've got myself a ~/bin/bird-tag that will generate the list of tags.

I've been importing my photos into Adobe Photoshop Album over the last few years, entering titles and tagging the images. The titles go into the images in the EXIF header, but the tags and other information is held in Adobe's proprietary database. I can extract the EXIF:ImageDescription with python or perl, and some of the other image viewers will display it... some, but not all. My latest experiments have been with Google's picasa, or more specifically, the beta version from picasaweb.google.com, which allows geocoding and has various tie-ins with GoogleEarth. Unfortunately it seems that Picasa uses the IPTC:Caption-Abstract as the source of its title, so all the information I've entered via Photoshop Album is ignored.

A few quick searches and then, Phil Harvey's came exiftool to the rescue! Read and write every single possible type of metadata, at least every possible type I'm interested in at the moment.

exiftool -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationCode=AUS *JPG
exiftool -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationName=Australia *JPG

I'm not really sure what to do with the postcodes (zipcodes), I think I'll put them into IPTC:Sub-Location, at least until someone sends me a nasty-gram telling me the correct field to use.

PSAtools was next (the author no longer maintains it, but I found a copy archived elsewhere. Dump out the Photoshop Album catalogue into CSV and XML text files so I can play with it to my heart's content.

Not sure what I think of tags. I think they're a poor mans meta-data, for those people to lazy to properly annotate things, or those developers too lazy to develop decent interfaces to allow proper annotation. I've already had a run-in with the multiple possibilities of Victoria, for example. Today I tagged a fotothing foto that had contained a lion, then looked for other lions. I got told that similar tags included dandelion, sealion, and pavilion. Ok, I'll accept the first two, but the third made me nearly splutter my coffee out my nose.