Overview

My organizing system is a digital photo library.  Specifically, I will be examining my own personal Flickr library.

What resources are being used?

Flickr began as a website for sharing photographs online.  In 2008, Flickr expanded the scope of the system to allow for short videos as well.  This was initially limited to 90 seconds (a limit that was eventually expanded to 180 seconds).

Flickr has a 1TB limit on accounts, so there is certainly enough size to fit all photos and videos I have ever taken, but I have intentionally limited the scope in my Flickr library to photos that I subjectively consider to be of a high enough quality to warrant sharing with the public.  For example, photos of my brunch are not within the scope of my Flickr organizing system (it may be fair game for Instagram, in contrast).

Comments on my photos from other users are another type of resource organized within my Flickr library.

Why are the resources organized?

The primary reason for the Flickr library organizing system is to share photography with the rest of the world.  Allowing online users to view my photographs is the primary interaction the system is designed for.  Because of this priority, the photos are organized in various ways, such as sets and collections to allow users to view groups of related photos.

A secondary goal of the system is to allow these users to interact with the photographs in various ways (e.g., to comment on them, or to mark them as their “favorites”).

Another goal of the online Flickr library is preservation – it is important to have an off-site backup of digital files in case of burglary, data loss, or disasters.  However, this is only a secondary goal of the organizing system – if it were a primary goal, the scope would need to be expanded to be less selective.

How much are the resources organized?

Many people find photos through search queries (both on Flickr and other search engines like Google Image Search), so it is important to have helpful resource descriptions.  These take the form of a photo descriptions, as well as tags.  I geotag my photos with latitude and longitude markers to enable searching of my photos by location (as a special case, photos taken near my home are not geotagged for privacy reasons).

Flickr allows users to use arbitrary tags, so enforcing a controlled vocabulary at a Flickr-wide level is impossible.  However, within my own personal library I attempt to be consistent about the tags used to enable the retrieval of related photos.  For example, all photos taken with an iPhone 5S are consistently tagged “iphone5s” to enable users to find all photos taken with a particular camera.

The categories delineated by the tags used are primarily oriented around the subject of the photo (“goldengatebridge”, “sunset”), but may also be oriented around the location of the photo, the camera used to take the photo, or the “genre” of the photo (“sanfrancisco”, “iphone4s”, “portrait”).

The photos are also organized into sets of related photos.  The sets are then arranged into collections, forming a system that resembles a hierarchical classification system (except photos maybe found in multiple sets).  Similar to the way I use tags, I have sets for “genre”s (e.g., a “Black & White” set), location (“New Zealand”, “Taiwan”), as well as sets with more subjective selection criteria like “My Favorites”.

When are the resources organized?

Flickr photos are all organized much later than the time of creation.  Because the purpose of my organizing system is to share photos I like (or think are good photos), I tend to edit photos in a third-party program (e.g., Apple Aperture, Adobe Photoshop) before uploading them to Flickr.  This process sometimes takes a long time, and I might not edit a photo for months (or even years) after the photo was taken.

Who does the organizing?

The organizing of the photos is done entirely by me.  By design, Flickr does not allow other users to add photos to sets or collections.  However, Flickr does give the option of allowing other users to add tags to photos.  Because I use tags as a sort of personal categorization, I do not allow other users to tag my photos.

Other considerations

Different users on Flickr tends to use tags differently – the lack of a controlled vocabulary sometimes becomes a problem when searching for photos.  For instance, if you want to look for all photos relating to autumn, do you look for photos tagged “fall” or “autumn”?