Wanna be awesome? Help clean up CD-Media tags!

FIRST General Forum
1

It never fails, despite the best efforts of the voters and moderators: images on CD-Media wind up with no tags, the wrong tags, or not the full set of tags. Over the course of the season, the amount of photos needing tag help tends to grow, which means that the photos themselves are much harder to find in the future. Fortunately, this is easily fixed with a lot of [strike]cheap labor[/strike] fine folks stepping up.

Getting started is easy, just start looking at images. There are lots of 2008 season images that need help, and there are most likely a lot of pre-CD-Media images that are also in need of tags. Click the little tag, and that’ll open a box for you to enter tags. What are the appropriate tags?


You’ve got Mark Leon, Paul Copioli, and Michelle Celio at the 2008 IRI. Therefore, the proper tags are:

"Mark Leon" "Paul Copioli" "Michelle Celio" "Indiana Robotics Invitational" "Indiana Robotics Invitational 2008" 2008 "Off-Season Competition"

Since those names are two words, the quotes are required lest you get two incorrect tags. (Alternatively, you can enter them smashed together, e.g. offseasoncompetition. I prefer typing them this way, so that’s how you’ll see them for the rest of the examples.)


This is FRC 1618’s robot from 2008. The appropriate tags here are:

frc1618 2008 robot

frc1618 is used to distinguish from, say, FTC 1618 should one exist. The tag of “robot” is only used in a reasonably tight shot of a robot; six of them on a field doesn’t get that tag. (Matter of fact, most on-field shots don’t get tagged that way either.)


This would be Dan Swando with some robots at the 2006 Florida Regional. Since we can make out a fair amount of 1902 and 1523 here, the tags are:

danswando frc1523 frc1902 floridaregional floridaregional2006 2006 regional

Note that “Florida Regional” is the official name of the event. There’s a little bit of blue bumper showing behind 1523’s robot, a sign of 108 that year, but there’s just too little to justify the tag. (If this were the Championship instead, the relevant tags would be championship2006 championship.)


This is me on a Segway. The photo was uploaded to be my Who Am I image, so the tags are:

Billfred whoami Segway.

The Segway tag is there because there’s a prominent Segway, though that should be obvious. The whoami tag will allow you to see a little name tag button, which lets you set the image as your WAI.


Here are Karthik and KathieK at the FVC World Championships in 2007, which was part of the 2007 Championship. Obviously, KathieK is not Kathie’s real name (and Karthik has a last name as well). In cases where folks are known by both their CD user name and their real name, tag both*. As a bonus, it was once used in a caption contest. Therefore, the tags you want are:

2007 championship championship2007 fvcworldchampionship fvcworldchampionship2007 karthik karthikkanagasabapathy kathiek kathiekentfield captioncontest

*There are nuances to this, depending on the person; virtually nobody tags photos of Dave Lavery with dlavery, his username here, and nobody tags photos of me “Billfred Leverette” or “William Leverette” despite my full name being no real secret. If in doubt, search for the tag you think is appropriate.

There are some other specific tags (e.g. “Championship Winner” for a close-up of a robot that won the Championship, “Caption Contest” for the [strike]victims[/strike] subjects of a caption contest, etc.), but don’t worry about them unless you know they qualify. (For example, you’d definitely want to tag a shot of 217’s robot from this year as “Championship Winner”, even if it isn’t presently tagged as such.)

In addition to tagging an image, you can vote on others’ tag requests. Click the check mark on the lower-right corner of the tags, and you can vote either to add, delete, or abstain on a given tag along with your comments either way. Four unanimous votes settles the matter; after two weeks and at least one vote, the majority rules.

To that end, the easiest way to dive in is to start on this page, which shows every untagged CD-Media image. If you’re more of a voter than a tagger, the photos with tags to vote on are here.

Hopefully, this guide helped navigate the basic tagging guidelines of CD-Media. Now go out there and help keep CD-Media beautiful!

Edit 1: Added Karthik/KathieK example for usernames that differ from actual names, and put code tags around the tags to eliminate any comma concerns.

2

I made this a sticky. Maybe everyone should be forced to read this before they can upload a photo?

3

Excellent guide, Billfred.

I’ll link to this from the upload page, so people get to see some more examples before uploading.

4

There are A LOT of photos to tag and vote on. If you’ve got nothing to do, just go and vote. Right now there’s around 9300 pictures to vote on. I think that’s enough to keep everyone busy for quite a while.

5

Are there premade tags and you just select which ones to add. If there isnt one a moderator has to aprove to add to the list.

6

By “premade tags” there are not a huge pulldown list you can choose from or anything like that, but when you type one in, double check to see if it’s a popular one for any images here by clicking on the tag word which now shows up along side the image, & see if any results come up.

If yours is the only image that shows in the search results, you may want to delete that, & try something else instead.

As a side note, how do you vote on and/or delete tags on images more specifically? I’ve seen some that I don’t agree with but there is no trash barrell next to the tag to delete one that just doesn’t go with the picture.
(ie: a misspelled tag word or something to that effect)

7

The trashcan should** show up if the tag is not already in the voting process. If it is in the voting process, and you haven’t voted, then a ‘No’ vote is the same as clicking the trashcan.

** Some restrictions apply. The very few tag auto-moderators can always delete, without any vote, for instance. Also, if nobody has voted on a tag you suggested, you can delete it without any voting. And there are weird restrictions around the Who-Am-I tag, for some reason that I can’t remember off the top of my head.

8

Now that I’ve been on CD Media for a while, I realized there aren’t page numbers. I think there should be page numbers like in the threads. Is there any reason we don’t have this?

9

When your browse the photos in CD media…there are page numbers, unless I’m missing something…

Unless you mean when people reply to a picture there are no page numbers for the posts, you could always click “View Entire Thread”.

In other news, I once wrote a tagging guide, it probably needs some updates, but for reference http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1839

10

I mean a jump to page, like if I wanted to go from Page 1 to 10. How it is now, I would have to go through all ten pages.

11

I agree – a jump to a page is really necessary. I have to scroll page by page through more than 30 pages to find a photo from last year.

Another dilemma with the current system is that the page labeled “page 1” always shows the most current photos. If I want to see a photo again a week later, it may have moved to page 3 or who knows how far beyond. This makes it really hard to find photos at a later time. If the pages could be labeled in chronological order so that a photo stays on the same page (the same way that posts stay on the same page in a thread), this would be preferable. I have no problem with the pages being displayed in reverse order (so you always see the newest photos first), as long as they are labeled in a way that doesn’t change with the addition of new stuff.

As it is, I have to bookmark every single photo I think I might want to reference later to avoid scrolling through endless pages.

12

Someone (who is free to identify herself if she chooses) posed the question: Why tag?

Tagging isn’t important in the near-term, to be honest. If you’re looking for pictures from IRI this year, you can probably view all the images and click backward soon enough to get to most of them. However, you’ll have a nightmare finding them in a few months (or years!) down the line when you’re looking for them.

Case in point: Let’s say you’re looking for an image of one of the most dominant FRC robots in history, 71 in 2002. Searching (in the traditional sense) could require a whole range of terms, probably including permutations of beatty, team hammond, 71, 2002, and robot. Not every search is guaranteed to give you the photo you were looking for.

By having a set of standardized tags, one can use known tags to whittle things down quickly. Even the most photo-attracting teams don’t have that many shots on CD, and 71 is no exception: only 73 photos at the moment, arranged chronologically by upload date. Odds are that most photos of that robot were uploaded around (wait for it!) 2002. So look up photos tagged frc71, either by finding it in the tag cloud on the tags page (which, admittedly, could have an easier interface for jumping to a specific tag), or just type it in directly: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/tags/thetagwithnospaces. Personally, I made a Firefox bookmark with keyword “phototags” and URL http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/tags/%s, which lets me type just “phototags frc71” in my address bar. However you get to the page of tagged images, just click over a few pages and there it is.

When you’re looking for an image of historic robots, legendary plays, the old school, the new school, blue hair, no hair, or just a friendly game of catch, tagging can save the day.