tagcow

I noticed today that Thomas Hawk (and later TechCrunch) are writing about a service called TagCow, which apparently can tag large batches of photos at a time. Anyone who takes a lot of pictures can attest to the immense annoyance of tagging tons of photos, especially when you want to be very specific about them. Sure, you can batch tag when you upload, but then you still have to go back and add whatever other tags are needed depending on the individual photo (like batch tagging all my SXSW photos “sxsw” “austin” “conference” and then going back and adding someone’s name, etc). Pain in the butt, right? Some people (like Tantek) bow to the wisdom of crowds and simply add a “needs tags” note to the photos, but it would be nice to have a service or program that could actually recognize the content of the photo and do it for you.

Is TagCow that much-needed service? Thomas seems to think so, although he admits that he’s not quite sure how the technology works. TechCrunch says that it’s got to be people actually viewing each photo and giving it the appropriate tags, although how someone could go through that many photos is beyond me (says the girl who works for a “people-powered search engine“). Arrington says:

The answer is, humans do it. I note that the TagCow site is careful not to say anything about the tagging process, and never use the word “automated” or anything else that would suggests computers are doing the work. Munjal Shah, the founder of Riya/Like, agreed, noting that it recognized a witch in Thomas’ photo – he says this just isn’t something a computer can do today.

But this makes me concerned about privacy. If I’m uploading 200 photos from my vacation, do I really want a bunch of dudes sitting around an office picking apart each one? No, obviously not. Therefore, I probably wouldn’t use the service. However, since TagCow is being a little vague about how everything works, I’m worried that people will walk into a situation where their privacy could be at stake. Does TagCow keep copies of the photos you send them? Do they live on some server there, even though you’re only tagging them for, say, your personal collection (as opposed to being on Flickr or Zooomr)? TC also writes:

And the business is definitely a little sketchy. Worried about the privacy of your data? Just don’t click on their Privacy Policy or Terms of Use: “Privacy policy is TBD.” and “Legal stuff TBD.” Not exactly a way to build confidence.

Yikes. Anyhow, I’m aware that I’m putting on my tinfoil hat a little early, considering we hardly know anything about TagCow. It could be the answer to our tagging prayers, or it could be a huge privacy-sucking black hole. For now I think I’ll continue adding my metadata by hand.

However, their tagline is hilarious.

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