Please make auto-tagging an option during import

bptheo

I manually tag all my photos, and the tags auto-generated based on the file names during import just causes me extra work to have to remove them all.

Can this *please* be made an option?

Thanks!

-Brian

Andy

Hello,

I'm curious - since you tag your photos with keywords, why are you also changing the filenames?

bptheo

Andy,

I don't for each photo. Rather, use CS3 Bridge when importing from my camera, and use filename prefixes in bulk that make sense to me relating to a group of photos (e.g., "bath_time", resulting in a filename like "bath_time_20081108_2057.jpg")... and SM will import with tags "bath", "time", "20081108_2057". So, not exactly the tags I would have used myself.

A simple on/off switch for auto-tagging would be preferred in my opinion, as I'm sure others make quite good use out of the auto-tagging feature.

Regards,

-Brian

Andy wrote:

Hello,

I'm curious - since you tag your photos with keywords, why are you also changing the filenames?

Andy

I wish it were as easy as that, I really do

pilotdave

Andy wrote:

I wish it were as easy as that, I really do

If it's easier, forget the on-switch and just go with the off-switch.

Seriously though, I've asked for this before and I'm sure I'll ask for it again. This is a truly silly feature that could be handled in such better ways. It causes lots of problems (like requiring reserved keywords to prevent tons of inappropriately keyworded images). Why not make filenames searcheable (and preferably editable)? Why not create a tool that turns filenames into keywords when requested?

I bet you guys already have thousands, if not tens of thousands or more inappropriately keyworded images. And there can be whole galleries worth of mis-keyworded images due to filenames. It's not a lot of fun when you get hundeds of incorrect search results due to this bug. And it's less fun when you don't let us use the keywords we want because they're reserved... including real words like "web." What's a spider enthusiast to do?

PLEASE remove this so-called feature.

Dave

jfriend

pilotdave wrote:

If it's easier, forget the on-switch and just go with the off-switch.

Seriously though, I've asked for this before and I'm sure I'll ask for it again. This is a truly silly feature that could be handled in such better ways. It causes lots of problems (like requiring reserved keywords to prevent tons of inappropriately keyworded images). Why not make filenames searcheable (and preferably editable)? Why not create a tool that turns filenames into keywords when requested?

I bet you guys already have thousands, if not tens of thousands or more inappropriately keyworded images. And there can be whole galleries worth of mis-keyworded images due to filenames. It's not a lot of fun when you get hundeds of incorrect search results due to this bug. And it's less fun when you don't let us use the keywords we want because they're reserved... including real words like "web." What's a spider enthusiast to do?

PLEASE remove this so-called feature.

Dave

I've weighed in on this one more than few times, but I'll join the fun and add my two cents. I agree with the general sentiment here. It's just wrong to take our carefully keyworded images and pollute the keyword space with manufactured keywords from the filenames. In my case, I don't even change the filenames and I get junk keywords. JF2_1234.jpg ends up with a junk keyword of JF2 and 1234. Further, a carefully added keyword like Game1 is not indexed for keyword searching because it contains both alphas and numerics which is completely non-standard behavior. The keyword actually shows, but click on it to show images with that keyword shows nothing. That's just downright buggy to anyone who sees it.

I HAVE to hide keywords globally and take that feature away from my viewers because I can't afford the time to manually cleanup all the junk after every single upload.

We've discussed this enough times that Smugmug knows this and knows the current behavior is not the way it should be. It's just a question of when they will EVER decide to prioritize this issue and finally fix it. To all of you who this matters to, I guess we just have to keep speaking up because I know of no other way to convince them to finally prioritize this issue and fix it.

Richard

jfriend wrote:

I've weighed in on this one more than few times, but I'll join the fun and add my two cents. I agree with the general sentiment here. It's just wrong to take our carefully keyworded images and pollute the keyword space with manufactured keywords from the filenames. In my case, I don't even change the filenames and I get junk keywords. JF2_1234.jpg ends up with a junk keyword of JF2 and 1234. Further, a carefully added keyword like Game1 is not indexed for keyword searching because it contains both alphas and numerics which is completely non-standard behavior. The keyword actually shows, but click on it to show images with that keyword shows nothing. That's just downright buggy to anyone who sees it.

I HAVE to hide keywords globally and take that feature away from my viewers because I can't afford the time to manually cleanup all the junk after every single upload.

We've discussed this enough times that Smugmug knows this and knows the current behavior is not the way it should be. It's just a question of when they will EVER decide to prioritize this issue and finally fix it. To all of you who this matters to, I guess we just have to keep speaking up because I know of no other way to convince them to finally prioritize this issue and fix it.

The curious thing is that I have only today noticed the garbage it is putting into the keywords and I have not changed my filename scheme. Since SM does not automatically pick up (and keyword) IPTC location fields, I have to add Madrid and Spain manually. To add insult to injury, my naming scheme is yymmdd_nnnn, which is then broken into two keywords with the underscore deleted. Effectively, that means that I can't even do a reasonable search of the file name. This makes file maintenance a real headache for me. Yuck.