Re: IMatch Categories Q?

 <geopappas2 <at> yahoo.com> writes:
 
> My question is what to do with the gender of birds. The gender of 
> many birds can be told by their plumage. For example, the male 
> Northern Cardinal is bright red, whereas the female is mostly light 
> brown.
> 

You're dealing with a tradeoff here. #2 (male/female categories beneath each
species) is more work & takes more categories, but is unambiguous. #1 (a
parallel set of categories for male/female) works best for a single subject
matter but breaks down when you have to specify multiple subjects. I think when
you have multiple subjects, it's probably best to use #1 but also start tagging
those images with descriptions ("male mallard (top left) and female northern
pintail (bottom right)") or keywords (e.g. "mallard (M); northern pintail (F)"),
depending on whether you want to use these tags for human-readable purposes or
data-processing purposes (or both!).

You could have the most information-packed scheme for annotating images that
goes into things like outlining graphically where each of the subjects are
located in the image -- but it requires lots of work to set up. I started
spending lots of time tagging my images, then realized that the only reason to
go to that level of detail was for things I would be unlikely to easily
remember, or for things that I specifically wanted to process automatically in a
script. If I have a series of images in the same place on my hard drive called
"boiler01.jpg", "boiler02.jpg", etc., adding a category like
"Home.appliances.boiler" doesn't add much additional value if all I want to do
is find the photos I took of my old corroded boiler.

My collection is of plants & I'm facing similar issues in dealing with multiple
subjects... what I was thinking of doing was getting in the habit of tagging
each picture with its original filename coming from the camera (e.g. DCP0001.jpg
or P00000001.jpg), then renaming as necessary, and making cropped copies of each
subject. E.g. if I have a photo of a blueberry flower right next to a mountain
laurel flower, I'll have both my original picture and a cropped copy of each of
them individually. For my purposes the cropped copies then have one subject each
and are simpler to deal with, and since they have a tag that I can use to find
the original image, then I can go back later and see those images in their
original context if I want. I have the same issue w/ my bird feeders, it's very
difficult to ensure that one bird at a time is in the photo.




 
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