What are Flickr Tags?

In the last post, I explained what Flickr sets are — and now I’ll explain to you what you can do with tags in Flickr.

Tags are like associated keywords for any picture — thus for a vaction picture from Japan of Mount Fuji, you could use these tags:

japan
vacation
mount fuji
snow

The next time, you are searching for that particular picture in the 21,894 pictures you have uploaded to Flickr — all you need to do then is use these tags as search terms — and you’ll find the picture you are searching for!

Not only can you search for tags that you have provided to your photos, you can also search for tags that other Flickr users have applied to their uploaded photos.

Adding Tags

Most of the time, all sorts of uploading options allow you to apply tags when you are uploading your photos to Flickr. But there might be times when you want to add tags to photos already in your Flickr account. To do that, follow these steps:

1. Make sure that you are signed into your Flickr account — if you don’t have a Flickr account, create one — you’ll find instructions here… 
2. Click the picture for which you want to add tags. This will open the Flickr page for that picture as you can see in Figure 1.
   Figure 1: The Flickr page for any photo
3. On the bottom right of the photo, you’ll find an option called Add a tag (see Figure 1 above). Click this option.
4. This will show a text box where you can enter your tags — just type in your tags.Separate tags with spaces. If you are using a double word with a space such as water lilies, enclose them with the space within inverted commas (double quotes) like “water lilies” as you can see in Figure 2. You can also separate your tags with commas if spaces confuse you (I always use the commas).

   
   Figure 2: Add your tags

   If you want to choose from tags you have already applied to existing, uploaded photos, click the Choose from your tags option that you can see in Figure 2 above.

5. When you are done, click the Add button.

In upcoming posts, I’ll teach you how you can add the same tags to all photos in a set. If you don’t know what Flickr sets are, look at this previous post…

See Also: Flickr Tutorial Series

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