Danbooru

Tagging characters. Specific character traits vs what is in an image

Posted under General

Tags are supposed to describe visual elements of an image - not what is "supposed" to be there. If, for example, you know a character has a tail, but can't see it for whatever reason, it shouldn't be tagged with tail.

And when linking to posts, can you use the "post #nnnn" format? It makes it a lot easier to get to the post.

EDIT: Fencedude beat me to it.

But as I have pointed out earlier, people tend to err on the side of what they are supposed to see.

Give Kirisame Marisa fans a Marisa with orange or yellowish-brown eyes, they are quite likely to tag the pic with yellow_eyes. Give Arima Senne fans a Senne with pink or reddish-brown eyes, they are likely to use red_eyes.

Just moments ago, I was inches away from automatically tagging post #612942 with purple_hair. Well, I suppose there is a bit of purple just under the hat, but... You get the idea.

Bapabooiee said:
And when linking to posts, can you use the "post #nnnn" format? It makes it a lot easier to get to the post.

Fixed.

Anyway just wanted clarification. Been tagging on what I see except in the first image and that got me to ask the question.

Katajanmarja said:
Sticking to what is unambiguously visible, I have avoided adding witch_hat to images like post #595481, but will use it from now on.

I don't think it's prominent enough in that image to deserve a tag. If you're going to tag something based on 'extra information', it should have some extra relevance. Usefulness beats comprehensiveness.

Yeah, it basically boils down to if something's there at all. If none of a tail or broom is visible, then it's not "in the pic", and thus not tagged. If a significant portion is visible, but it's not entirely ovious what it is, then metadata could be used to determine that it's, say, a broom instead of a plunger. Same for on-the-fence decisions about eye color; if you know what it's supposed to be, you can err on that being the intention. Translations, too, can help in figuring what something (or more especially, someone) is in a picture, since sometimes you can only see, like, a hand or arm. Likewise, translation help in tags like, egh, incest, where they could just be whoever, but an intent is make clear with the text.

...or something like that, I guess.

When in doubt about whether to tag an more ambiguous feature, keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of Danbooru tags is to help people search for images. Ask yourself "Would someone doing a tag search for the tag I want to add/remove want to see this image?"; if the answer to that question isn't obvious, then I would add the tag for reasons of completeness, as you said, but sometimes thinking of it like that makes it clear that a tag doesn't really belong. To use the same examples you have, somebody searching "kirisame_marisa witch_hat" almost certainly wasn't looking for pictures like post #595481, but somebody searching "kirisame_marisa broom" probably was looking for pictures like post #608681.

The one situation where this heuristic doesn't work, unfortunately, is character tagging: for reasons I don't completely agree with, policy on Danbooru is to tag all characters that appear in an image, regardless of significance; thus, post #248049 is tagged shanghai despite the fact that Shanghai is, at most, 30 of the ~2.5 million pixels in that image. (With luck, albert will implement a "major/minor appearance" flag for character tags like someone suggested in the Danbooru 2 thread, which would solve this problem quite nicely.)

glasnost said:
The one situation where this heuristic doesn't work, unfortunately, is character tagging: for reasons I don't completely agree with, policy on Danbooru is to tag all characters that appear in an image, regardless of significance; thus, post #248049 is tagged shanghai despite the fact that Shanghai is, at most, 30 of the ~2.5 million pixels in that image.

Related: forum #30437.

glasnost said:

[K]eep in mind that the ultimate purpose of Danbooru tags is to help people search for images. Ask yourself "Would someone doing a tag search for the tag I want to add/remove want to see this image?"; if the answer to that question isn't obvious, then I would add the tag for reasons of completeness, (...), but sometimes thinking of it like that makes it clear that a tag doesn't really belong.

A great summary of how I have perceived good tagging on Danbooru. I just could not have worded the theory part as well as you. Why not edit that a little and add it to howto:tag?

However, when applying the heuristic in practice, I get exactly the opposite results in the example case. The last time I searched "kirisame_marisa broom", I specifically wanted whole brooms, not ends of wooden sticks. The explanation for "kirisame_marisa witch_hat" is a bit lengthy, so I will pass it now. My point is that different people are after different things, and thus comprehensive tagging is most helpful in most cases.

(By the way, the very reason I started tag gardening was because I had done lots of tag searches myself. I wanted to help making searches even more useful for myself and others -- and still want to.)

Oh, and thanks to T5J8F8, too. I think you had very good points.

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