My daughter is involved in a mammoth task at present. She is tagging all of her music. Like most people her age, she has a huge volume of music in digital form and accesses it from her MP3 player. It’s a combination of CDs she has ripped, music she has downloaded, tracks she has obtained from her friends and  other audio from goodness knows where. I too have a fair number of audio files. The main difference between my daughter and I is that all my music is sorted in folders alphabetically, by artist then year then album whereas Gemma doesn’t seem to have much of an organising strategy. So I was surprised when she told me that she wasn’t going to rename or arrange her music files, only the tags. She explained her logic like this.

It doesn’t matter what the files are called or where they are stored. The software and hardware she uses looks at the tags and allows her to sort and filter her music accordingly. So the more accurate the tagging, the easier it is for her to build playlists “No-one plays albums .... people make playlists”. When she builds her playlists, she can use the tags like artist and genre to find the music she wants. When I try to build a playlist it takes me a long time, as I have to navigate through my organised but convoluted folder structure to get to individual files. I can’t really apply any filtering to my files because of the lack of metadata.

This got me thinking about other media I create and use – images, video, web pages. At present, I don’t really tag anything. I know my camera adds metadata to my photographs – date and time, as well as the other standard EXIF tags. Newer cameras than mine also include GPS location data with the photographs. It only remains to implement some sort of facial recognition algorithm and the tagging is complete. Best of all – it is all done automatically. Once again, it doesn’t matter what you call the image or even where you store it. It’s the metadata that is key. In the age of information explosion, it’s likely that tagging will become more and more important. How do you tag yours?

DrJim

Image citation : http://www.flickr.com/photos/oceanflynn/367600665/