Setting Good SmugMug Key Words

Finding good key words is not easy.  In many ways it is like creating a good book index.  Decent book indexes are carefully constructed by human readers that understand what is being indexed and why certain terms should be included. Superior indexes showcase the gems and bury the garbage. There is a lot of mediocre software out there that purports to automate this task but I remain unimpressed.  Machine indexing is like machine language translation: they both suffer from a lack of real understanding. I was reminded of how difficult indexing is while writing some code to update my SmugMug key words.

My first attempt at computing key words followed this recipe:

1. Run my little C# SmugMug metadata dumper to update image metadata.
2. Sift through the image metadata and extract all current key words.
3. Remove common English words from current key words.
4. Similarly, extract all image caption text and remove common English words.
5. Sort the remaining caption text key words by frequency.
6. Append the frequency sorted caption key words to corresponding current key words.
7. Take at most seven words from the appended list as key words.

My thinking was high frequency uncommon English words would make good keys.  This is generally the case but the removal of common English words from currently assigned keys was a big mistake.

I take care when naming image files.  SmugMug picks up words in image file names and uses them as default key words.  If you have good file names you will get useful keys automatically.  Removing common English words from file names deleted words that were present for good reasons.  For example: two common English words, “before” and “after,” are used in the file names of image restorations like this picture I took in Cyprus way back in 1968.

I think “before” and “after” are perfectly good keys for this image.

To avoid such problems I now leave file name words intact and augment these words with high frequency caption text words and print size keys like: 4×5, 4×6, 5×7 and 8×10.  Print size keys is another story. You can view my entire list of SmugMug keys here.