The world according to Flickr
Flickr, All time most popular tags
Update 20 Feb 06
e-tat says: “I’ve divided the tag list into rough categories and calculated percentages of each category as part of the whole. Here’s what I came up with:
32% are place names (New York…)
19% are place types (home, church…)
6% are place-based activities (camping, party…)
6% are placed objects (tree, clouds…)Thats a place-related total of 63%
The other tags relate to time, people, colors and other things:
13% are temporal (August, Xmas, …)
6% relate to color (B&W, red…)
The remainder are people, animals, objects and miscellany…”
Excellent, thanks!
February 17th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
This is interesting for what it says about the significance of place in people’s photographic imaginations.
I’ve divided the tag list into rough categories and calculated percentages of each category as part of the whole. Here’s what I came up with:
32% are place names (New York…)
19% are place types (home, church…)
6% are place-based activities (camping, party…)
6% are placed objects (tree, clouds…)
Thats a place-related total of 63%
The other tags relate to time, people, colors and other things:
13% are temporal (August, Xmas, …)
6% relate to color (B&W, red…)
The remainder are people, animals, objects and miscellany.
Of course, place enters into most photographs - unless they’re contrived - and the tags can be misleading or have several meanings. Rock is a good example of the latter, as it means stones, rock-cliffs, rock&roll, and You rock! This made categories a bit tricky in some instances. If you click on a tag, the subsequent page shows related links, and these can indicate the range of meanings.
All told, the tags may tell us something about people’s priorities and desires as expressed through photography and the tags they use. The high incidence of place names suggest - for instance - that going to particular places is a high priority, or that when people tag their photgraphs, they think of the place name before they think of the activity or object being photographed.