keyword organization

[vkfoto]

I get that keywords help in finding a specific photo among the thousands stored in my collection.The WHO is obvious and taken mostly care of by face recognition. The WHEN is easy except for scanned images where the scanned date will often be long after the original image was made.
As for WHERE, unless it is an image of a distant object, the camera is usually at the same place as the object. Which location do you use?
Where I have an problem with is the WHAT. I find a that I have a huge overlap between WHERE and WHAT.

For example, is a recognizable object a thing or a location? And how precise should the WHAT keyword be? Is it preferred to have WHAT = Zoo and WHERE = Chicago so that the combination both locates it and describes it. Or have a single keyword = "Chicago Zoo" and place it as a child of the WHERE = Chicago or as a child of the WHAT = Zoo?

Should a specific pastry shop in Paris be a child of the WHERE = Paris or part of the WHAT collection? Could it be part of both or would that create more problems?

What about WHY events like Christmas, birthdays, Easter, vacation, etc. is it better to have a generic keyword and rely on the WHEN and WHERE to locate them precisely?

I realize that everyone can have there own system and as long as it works for them, its fine. Looking for general principles so looking forward to read how other handle these issues.

[snowman1]

I prefer to use the places/people/events/objects paradigm as set up in PSU defaults - I find that works well. Early on in my days with idimager I tried subverting that to something I thought was better - it wasn't. So speaking from experience I would think in those terms rather than what/where/why - I understand your thought process but it doesn't seem to work in practice and the PSU way does (I find).

Following on from this, and addressing your specific questions, a recognisable object would often - I'd go so far as to say usually - have both what and where elements. E.g. the Eiffel Tower would be object = Eiffel Tower, place = Paris (even better, geotagged with correct lat/long). And I'd treat the pastry shop in the same way - but only if I thought "pastry shop" a significant enough object to want to find again in your pictures (by a search). In your example I would not have zoo as an object - I'd have Chicago Zoo as a place and "Day out to Zoo" as an event. For the specific photos I would have things like "elephant" or "reptile house" as objects.

Your last question on events, I think it depeneds how granular you want - and need - to go. I strongly suggest you don't go any more granular than you need to - if you only have 10 birthday pictures there's no point splitting these up into complicated sub-divisions, it's more work and more complexity. If and when you get to a greater number and feel the need it can be done then. Don't do more than you have to on labelling is sound advice.

That said, the exact system you use will be personal preference of course but may want "birthdays", "Christmas gatherings" as labels under "events", and you could then - if necessary - subdivide into "Mum's birthday" etc, even subdivide into Mum's Birthdays > 2018/2019/2020 etc. (and remember the timeline display rather than categories may be useful for events that have fixed date dependencies).

Personally under events I have labels such as "Holidays", "Weekends away", "Concerts" etc, and under them labels such as "2020-03 Claviere, Italy", "2020-09-07 Bainbridge, Yorkshire" "2018-01 Illegal Eagles" etc. I normally prefix with a date so the events under each such category appear in date order and can be easily located in the list. Mostly it's trips away I put under events, I don't find much benefit in labelling much else under events - but this will depend greatly on your own hobbies and needs. But for example I rarely use the concert category I mentioned - I'd just give a miscellaneous label when I import of "Illegal Eagles" (in that example) and that would be enough to find on a search without the effort of creating a label under concerts; the same with days out. But YMMV!

[Mke]

I follow much of Snowman's logic, but with a couple of tweaks on the schema. In particular I use the 'objects' category only for inanimate movable objects, and use several other top-level categories, notably, in this context, 'environment' and 'being'.

A trip to the Eiffel Tower while on holiday would be tagged under:
...event|personal event|travel|holiday|Paris 2020
...environment|built environment|building|tower
...place|Europe|France|Paris|Eiffel Tower

the pastry shop under:
...event|personal event|travel|holiday|Paris 2020
...environment|built environment|building|commercial building|shop|bakery
...place|Europe|France|Paris

and a photo of elephants at the zoo, on a birthday and while on holiday:
...being|animal|mammal|elephant
...event|personal event|travel|holiday|USA 2020
...event|personal event|anniversary|birthday|name's nth birthday 2020
...environment|semi-natural environment|zoo
...place|North America|Illinois|Chicago|Chicago Zoo

Note that I'd also add a relationship between 'Eiffel Tower' and 'tower', so that when the 'Eiffel Tower' is applied, 'tower' is automatically added. And likewise for 'Chicago Zoo' and 'zoo'. See Feature explained: Apply multiple related labels with one click

[bimo]

I most strictly follow the rules laid down in the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard 2019.1 specification (https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/ ... toMetadata) which is fully implemented in PSU's Details panel; choose Advanced from the Hamburger Menu.

In brief:

• WHEN is covered by several date items (each including time), e.g. the date the image was taken; the date the image was digitized (different to the date it was taken if scanned!); the date the GPS-Info was created etc.

• WHERE consists of two items: LocationCreated is the place where the camera was positioned when taking the photo and LocationShown (the place the camera is focused on / the place that is to be seen in the photo). While there's only one possible entry for LocationCreated, there may be several entries for LocationShown (depending on what is important to the photographer). The stored data for any location mainly consists of GPS data (longitude, latitude and height) and a more human-readable 5 level hierarchy: WorldRegion / Country / State or Province / City / Sublocation.
  BTW: LocationShown is the more important place - think eg of an image of Mount Fuji (=LocationShown) that was taken with a camera from a 200km distance (=LocationCreated)!

• Coming to your WHAT, PSU offers events if time related (a congress has been taken place; that is a kind of redefining a certain period of time (=redefining WHEN) or PSU redefines a LocationShown as an Artwork or Object or Landmark (=redefining WHERE).

• Concerning WHO: there might be a person or an organization or an animal in the image. While the IPTC specs only deal with persons and organizations, you are free to define your keywords for animals (and perhaps plants) within PSU. For the latter (animals and plants) you may even use the DARWIN CORE, a specific structure for biological topics.

• Moreover the IPTC specs allow for general classifications of e.g.
  • an image's source (camera, scanner, ...)
  • a scene code (portrait, aerial view, ...)
  • ...

With PSU it is very comfortable to realize a catalog based on the IPTC specs and directly link the catalog items to the appropriate IPTC schema and thus syncing the catalog entries to the images metadata sections.

[vkfoto]

Thank you all for the organization information, lots of food for thought. Will have to review my keyword organization and see how it can be improved.
@mike.
Seems some of your examples are a bit too granular for me but I like the idea. I think I'll use the top level OBJECTS in PSU to place of what you have under Environment. I think of shops, towers etc. as things i.e objects. For me, environments are hot, cold, wet, dry, etc.

Should information be shared among keywords? If the date/time is already coded and the location keyword is for USA, should the event | holiday | USA 2020 be that specific? I suppose it might quick to search for USA 2020 but a combination of date / location and just holiday should get the same results.

[Mke]

@mike.
Seems some of your examples are a bit too granular for me but I like the idea.

Find the level that is right for you - you can always add more categories later. I've got a hierarchy with >12,000 thousand labels, and I still restructure it occasionally and regularly add new items

I think I'll use the top level OBJECTS in PSU to place of what you have under Environment.

That's why you need to develop a hierarchy that works for you. My photos include lots of buildings, so the built environment is important to me.
But would you place 'field' or 'forest' under 'object' too? I'd place them under 'environment|natural environment'...

For me, environments are hot, cold, wet, dry, etc

FWIW, I have similar items under 'environment|natural environment|weather'

Should information be shared among keywords? If the date/time is already coded and the location keyword is for USA, should the event | holiday | USA 2020 be that specific? I suppose it might quick to search for USA 2020 but a combination of date / location and just holiday should get the same results.

You're right, adding dates does add a level of redundancy as you can indeed search using a combination of other items. I find it convenient that way.

[Sigi]

BTW: LocationShown is the more important place - think eg of an image of Mount Fuji (=LocationShown) that was taken with a camera from a 200km distance (=LocationCreated)![/list]

Where would I find "LocationShown" within PSU

Thanks

Sigi

[Mke]

Where would I find "LocationShown" within PSU

If - under the 'GEO Tag' panel - you apply Location, City, State/Province, Country Code, or Country, then PSU will automatically assign these values to LocationShown and LocationCreated in the metadata. If you turn to the 'Details' panel, you can see these values turn up under the IPTC Extension section, where you can also edit them. See also the Image Content section.

When creating labels, there is a Geo Location section; if you add the GEO coordinates, you can do a reverse Geo Lookup which will also add the data for LocationShown and LocationCreated if you choose to accept the default - or you can just add one or the other by changing the colored dots.

(FWIW, I think this would work better if LocationShown was automatically applied when GEO-coordinates are added during label creation, and if only LocationCreated was added when GEO-tagging photographs; I think this would cover the most common relationship between photographer and photograped).

In practice I don't lookup the location much, as I find that Google's lookup attempts aren't always reliable outside towns at home, while the results tend not to be helpful (for an English speaker) in non-English speaking countries (more here). Consequently my images don't contain many LocationShown or LocationCreated fields. But most are manually labeled at least to Town level, and they nearly all contain GEO coordinates, so the location can be easily identified.

It's usually obvious from the image and my labeling whether the coordinates relate to the location shown or location created. But as a quick, effective, but dirty way of adding a separate 'location shown' tag, I misuse a face-tagging box by linking it to a location instead of a person. It doesn't comply with the recognized standard for LocationShown, but does mean I can tag multiple 'locations shown' in one image, which the standard doesn't accommodate, but which is frequently useful for aerial photographs and some landscapes.

[Mke]

...as a quick, effective, but dirty way of adding a separate 'location shown' tag, I misuse a face-tagging box by linking it to a location instead of a person...

You can now do this properly in PSU v6, which now enables the region type to be something other than human, in accordance with the latest standard:
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RegionTypes.png (145.33 KiB) Viewed 29962 times