Flickr Magic View

[khiemtran]

Yesterday, I tried the Magic View feature on Flickr for the first time. This is where Flickr uses some impressive image recognition algorithms to categorise your photos, without you need needing to tag them.

The first category was "animal:bird", and, as you might expect, Flickr correctly identified 278 photos of various birds (and a couple of humpbacks). Knowing how hard this is, I was suitably impressed.

The second category was "animal:cat", and there were only two photos. The first was a dog...



And the second was a wallaby...

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I am not sure I want Flick auto-tagging my photos. It's pretty clever, but I don't particularly feel that tags like "outdoors" or "building" are helpful. I mean "outdoors" probably just gives you 90% of my photos.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Apparently, they do have a lot more tags that the algorithms are being trained on. I guess they want to avoid any problems like the Google Photos gorilla incident. I can see that once it gets a bit more reliable, it could make sorting my pictures easier, especially as the categories get more precise. I'd love a system that could guess an id for a particular bird, for instance, just using an image.

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

I wasn't too bothered by Flickr auto-tagging all my shots "outdoors" and "plant", but now it's started making aesthetic judgements and auto-tagging my shots "too dark" and "medium quality"...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. Was that in the magic view or somewhere else?

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was magic view. Flickr just started adding tags to my photos one day, without warning...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay, I've found it. I don't normally look that far down in the photo view. It looks like some of those tags are more accurate than the ones in magic view. It correctly tagged whales as "cetacean" instead of "bird".

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

These are the sorts of added features I could really do without. I guess they're good for other people's sake? In other words, if other people what photos of, say, tufted titmice, and I haven't happened to label my photos, but Flickr does, I suppose it could help others? But--it's a kind of strenuousness on Flickr's part that doesn't add much to the photographer's experience, it seems to me.

But look at those two cute cats. So adorable.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, I seem to get a lot of hits from other people searching for particular keywords. So, I guess this helps flickr serve them up more accurately. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to tagging though, so I can see if would save me some time as well, if the tagging was reliable enough.