Running a little behind on tagging your photos? Or maybe you have a backlog of photos that have never been tagged? Or perhaps you’re new to Flickr? In any case, TagCow makes photo tagging a super easy and automated process.
Photo or image tagging has historically been problematic for computers – they have enough trouble interpreting text, much less an image. TagCow uses a combination of people and computers to tag photos, fast. Through some black box approach, they distribute your images to a dispersed team of people via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. These people are paid to tag your images. The TagCow system even let’s you “train” the tagging to look for specific people, places, etc. if you want.
You can upload your images. But if you have a Flickr account, simply enter your login credentials within your TagCow account and TagCow automatically pulls down your images, appends any new tags, then reposts them to Flickr. Existing tags are not lost and photos remain intact. Plus, you can set the service to “listen” for any new images, so they automatically grab and tag any new photos.
I recently provided TagCow about 7,000 images to tag. I found the service relatively simple. However, they did have some “technical” problems which prevented them from completing the process in the two to three day time period. But they provided me a credit for my troubles. In general, the tagging is not extensive, and the “hints” you provide may get overlooked on some photos. But for a service like this, I don’t expect perfection or 100 percent accuracy. In short, it’s well worth the price.
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