This article grew out of a question submitted by one of our members, the Indexing and Taxonomy Manager of a major publishing company. She is interested in software tools for indexing images and taxonomies that make it easier for writers and researchers to locate images. Over the last several years, she has compiled this bibliography on the subject.

As it did for research papers and music, the Internet is changing the way images are distributed and that affects the way they are indexed. A new parent who wants to share baby photos with friends and family or an employee looking for an image to dress up a Powerpoint presentation has very different needs from a commercial publisher looking for a professional image to complement an article or illustrate a book.

We include below responses received from other members as well as a comparison of three image indexing methods:

Stock photography — A pre-Internet system of rights management and distribution for commercial artists and photographers. Some printed stock photography catalogs, such as Corbis, are now on the Web as searchable databases.

Internet image search — Specialized search engines such as Picsearch crawl the Web looking for images on public Web sites. Since image metadata on the public Web is limited, the search is much simpler, and there's no rights management.

Photo sharing sites — Web sites such as Flickr that allow amateur photographers to upload images via e-mail or camera phone, create "albums" of photos, share photos via the Web, RSS, or a blog, and assign (tag) photos with keywords.

Finally, we summarize a debate over traditional indexing vs. collaborative indexing or "folk taxonomies" ignited by the growing popularity of sites like Flickr.

Responses

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Created on January 26 l Updated on January 30, 2005