The tag game

Wanna play a game of tag?

Rewind to the days of being a kid and messing around in the school yard and you might remember hopscotch, kiss chase or a game called Tag. One kid runs after the others trying to tag them with their hand so they are “it” and become the chaser. Hours of fun. Kids connect with each other and many new friendship groups are made during a game of tag.

Well tagging your images on Flickr is similar. It’s a game with rules which enable you to showcase your work to connect with new people on Flickr. If you don’t tag then you’ll miss out on faves and shares and new followers. And we don’t think that’s right. So how can you crack this so it becomes something you do automatically, rather than something you want to swerve.

Where do you start?

At the beginning. You need to add tags to your photos and digital art when uploading them. That is an essential requirement because we will use your tags to connect them to your groups.

The tag must be a word that is meaningful to that group. The best word is always the most generic one that may be safely added to additional groups. Since most groups have very specific photo types, terms like landscape, portrait, nature, wildlife, and street photography will be perfect for many groups.

Check out the photographers in the groups you want to be in for inspiration and create a list on a document or notepad so you can research once and use it many times.

Let’s take my current obsession with bird photography as an example. Here’s one of the photos in Flickr:

Tags should represent and describe something related to the photo you are uploading and that can be related to a group you are participating and willing to share an image with.

You’ll notice that some of the tags of the image are: bird, wildlife, nature and perching. I like to share all my bird photos to Birding groups but I also share them to Nature lover groups. Here’s an example:

• Birding groups with bird tag ( 7 groups ).
• Nature lovers of all kind of animals with nature tag ( 4 groups ).
• Wildlife groups with wildlife tag ( 3 groups ).
• Perching birds groups with perching and bird tags. This group is only for birds which are perching on a branch or cable ( 1 group )

With only four tags we could be easily sharing this photo into at least fifteen different groups just in one step.

Keep in mind that you can add the tags while uploading the photo to Flickr or later on. All the photo information will be updated no matter when it’s tagged.

How to configure each group

To configure each group you have to go to: Groups page. You can add tags to each group in three different ways:

• Write a tag: if you already know the tag you want to add you can just write the tag directly and hit enter.
• Suggested tags: if you are not sure what tag to use and want to investigate what other users have been using you can get a list of most used tags. It’s ordered by the most used to least used.
• ‘Configure’ button on the settings menu ( three dots ): There you can filter, as well, through all most used tags or add any tag you want. The interesting part is that for each tag you will see all your photos with that tag.This will give a fast glimpse of which photos you would be sharing to the group.

Once you’ve configured as many groups as you want, you can ‘Sync’ any photo on the Photostream page. Skedr will go through all of the tags in that photo and share it with all groups that match those tags.

If you still have some questions, however weird or wonderful, feel free to drop us a line here: [email protected] and we’re always happy to help.

Read more about the art of tagging on Flickr and discover which are the top 20 Flickr tags right here. Enjoy.