I think I need to learn more about iMatch’s property fields.

And I think I’m going to try to adapt the guidelines that are set forth at the controlled vocabulary site, in the metalogging section. It is more geared to professionals than soccer moms, but I think it’s a basis for me to work from.

Really it doesn’t matter – as long as I find something that works for me today – and will make sense to me when I use it again in 6 months!
Marion

Those are great questions you pose. I have to admit that I do not have a perfect solution to all of them. Here’s what I do with the specific examples you brought up:

1) THING. I’ve had to deal with this in the context of photos taken of someone’s artwork (museum visits, sculptures, and so on). I solved this problem by having a Property field in IMatch that I use to store “OriginalAuthor” (as opposed to author of the photo, typically me). Properties are a little bit more inconvenient to search on, but this was better than proliferating the tag tree with yet more one-off tags (I already have over 3,000 tags…)

2) PLACE. I don’t usually associate places with people quite as closely as you described. I do create tags for places, and I usually put a note in the Description field of the tag to describe what the place is about (e.g. a “Where.USA.California.San Jose.Foo Elementary School” tag might have description “Mary and Betty’s school”). You could also define a sub-tag like “Who.People.Mary.Schools” that contains references to the school(s) that Mary has attended, either directly as a formula inside the “Schools” tag, or as sub-tags of that tag. Personally, I avoid doing that because it muddles the scope of the Mary tag: either I have to narrow it down to show only photos assigned to that specific tag (=exclude child tags), or accept that the tag will show me everything related to Mary even if it does not contain Mary.

3) ACTIVITY. I typically solve this with a specialized sub-tag of the activity tag. The most common example is “Why.Events.Birthdays” tag that contains several sub-tags for each of my family members.

With reference to A3 above, how do you address other issues which are ABOUT John, when John isn’t in the image?

Examples:
- you have an image of a THING which is clearly associated with Betty, but Betty is not in the image (ie, I have an image of a blanket that Betty made for me)
- you have an image of a PLACE which is clearly associated with Mary, but Mary is not in the image (ie, I have an image of my daughter’s elementary school, on the first day of kindergarten, when she refused to have her photo taken; this photo is ABOUT Mary, even though Mary is not in the image)
- you have an image of an ACTIVITY which is clearly associated with Carol, but Carol is not in the image (ie, Carol had a bunch of friends over for a party but she is not in every photo)

I run into this quite frequently and I’m interested in your feedback -
Thank you
Marion