Mega tags now appearing

[Bryan]

Just noticed today, following the (welcome) introduction of longer than 4 word tags, that an indeterminate number of my images have acquired Mega tags comprising a string of often unrelated words, apparently lifted from individual keywords associated with the images.

 

No idea how this will affect search results, or how many photos involved, but currently disentangling those that I can find.

 

Not even slightly happy

[RedSnapper]

10 words per tag is the new limit...

 

km

[KevinS]

Byran,

 

Took a quick look and found a few so far. Not a large percentage, but they look messy.

 

Most of my old images that I haven't worked on looked alright, but with a fair number of duplicate tags.

[wiskerke]

Holy moly.

These old style keywords:

 

Giethoorn Netherlands windmill museum

Ciconia ciconia storks' nesting pole with storks nesting stork storks nest Tjasker windmill

Farmhouse Museum 't Olde Maat Uus in Giethoorn Tjasker windmill small traditional Nederland Netherlands Holland Overijssel Dutch "Wim Wiskerke" a view an image of with and in & vertical -

 

Now has been transformed into:

 

*Giethoorn
*Netherlands
*museum

 

traditional
vertical
view
windmill
with

t,Dutch,Farmhouse,Giethoorn,Holland,Maat,Museum,Nederland,Netherlands,Olde,Overijssel,Tjasker,Uus,Wim (=1 tag =100 char)

Wiskerke,a,an,and,at,ciconia,image,in,nest,nesting,of,pole,small,stork,storks,storks (=1 tag=84 char)

 

So it has changed all spaces into colons? And then cut it off at 100 char.

But thrown out the word windmill from the supertags?

And randomly chosen some words to be regular tags?

 

Facepalm.

 

I tell you this is not an algorithm. This thing is alive and has Alzheimer's.

How many more like these are there?

 

wim

 

edit: typo

[John Mitchell]

A lot of my old images are now a "meta-mess." 

 

Thank goodness for captions.

[Betty LaRue]

Mine are ok, I think. I spot checked some of the legacy images I haven't worked on yet and they look like they have always looked since the new AIM.

Thank heavens I have used commas for so long instead of spaces. That's keeping them straight.

I do have some with only spaces...if I can find the proper year.

Betty

[wiskerke]

I have checked my 2017 and 2016 uploads:

 

2017 - 27 images uploaded - all keyworded under the new system - only 1 = 3.7% affected.

2016 - 249 images uploaded - of which about wholly or partially 75 keyworded under the new system - 24 = 9.6% affected.

10 of which had been keyworded under the new system.

 

So it's not only legacy images and it seems to be totally random so far.

 

wim

[John Mitchell]

Mine are ok, I think. I spot checked some of the legacy images I haven't worked on yet and they look like they have always looked since the new AIM.

Thank heavens I have used commas for so long instead of spaces. That's keeping them straight.

I do have some with only spaces...if I can find the proper year.

Betty

 

Unfortunately, I've used spaces, not commas, for most of my images. Results are inconsistent, though. Some with spaces now have nonsensical meta tags, and others don't.

[wiskerke]

That's only 8,925,978 images affected on all of Alamy if my %% are typical.

;-)

 

wim

[cbimages]

Oh dear, I read this thread, went and looked........now am beating my head against the wall !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Rubens Alarcon]

I've looked at about 50 of my images from different submissions. Good news (for me) . They are all OK. I've always used commas to separate the tags.

[Joseph Clemson]

I'e not seen any instances of mega tags created from random keywords. What I can see is many instances of the system creating a single mega tag which contained all the keywords which were originally in the 'Comprehensive' box in the old system (typically 'UK, England, day,daytime,outdoors,outside'). When first uploaded these would have been comma separated and then left in the comprehensive box when I moved other keywords to the Essentials etc.

 

I've no idea if this is an unintended bug in the transfer to the new system or a deliberate move by the Alamy. I wish someone would tell me as I need to decide whether to leave this single mega tag alone or to, laboriously, manually create single tags again. 

[John Crellin]

A tip on creating single tags again. Copy the mega tag text, paste into a text editor and put commas in then paste back into IM - works for me.

 

But seriously I noticed this a week back as I continue working through my submissions from the oldest. I assumed something in my submission style had subtly changed to cause this (It seems to be the comprehensives all being in one mega tag for me).

 

But "at what point do I have complete control ?" is my worry - might the system revisit my edited tags and decide to mega tag again ?? I would like to think once an image has been edited in IM that flags it as "user controlled" but does it?

 

John Crellin

[Bryan]

But the good news is that YOU CAN NOW COPY AND PASTE from TAGS 

 

So sorting out the mess is a bit easier than first thought.

[spacecadet]

But the good news is that YOU CAN NOW COPY AND PASTE from TAGS 

 

So sorting out the mess is a bit easier than first thought.

It hasn't changed for me. Copy/paste still puts in a carriage return between tags. I have a macro in Word to replace it with a comma. Then they usually paste back in as separate tags, but can go in as a phrase. It seems  random.

[Bryan]

Maybe this has been available for some time Mark, but I've not noticed it.

 

I can copy from within individual tags, or groups of tags. If the latter, there is no space between tags, but I paste into my Google browser and insert the spaces.

[John Crellin]

It has just occurred to me that maybe the tags are created only when you open an image in IM. (Legacy images I mean.) This would explain why I now see the mega tags every old picture I open to edit tags?

 

Probably quite a sensible strategy of Alamy's that the keyword structure stays the same as ever until you interact with it ?

 

John

[M.Chapman]

I haven't found any "mega-tags" in my images yet. Is there an easy way to find them, other than manually selecting and then deselecting each image in turn?

 

Maybe I've been lucky? I've almost always used commas between keywords and rarely got close the character counts in main and comprehensive in the old MI.

[John Mitchell]

I haven't found any "mega-tags" in my images yet. Is there an easy way to find them, other than manually selecting and then deselecting each image in turn?

 

Maybe I've been lucky? I've almost always used commas between keywords and rarely got close the character counts in main and comprehensive in the old MI.

 

I select all the images in a submission at the same time and then look for mega-tags in the greyed-out area. Of course, I then have to go through the images one-by-one in order to find exactly which ones have been affected. No way I'll ever correct them all, so hopefully the new, super-intelligent search engine will be able to figure things out.

[ChrisC]

Just noticed today, following the (welcome) introduction of longer than 4 word tags, that an indeterminate number of my images have acquired Mega tags comprising a string of often unrelated words, apparently lifted from individual keywords associated with the images.

 

No idea how this will affect search results, or how many photos involved, but currently disentangling those that I can find.

 

Not even slightly happy

Oh dear, as if we need more confusion!!!

[ChrisC]

Just found this as a single tag 

• people waiting at Beckenham Station,railway line,train travel,platform,waiting,
• ,

[M.Chapman]

 

I haven't found any "mega-tags" in my images yet. Is there an easy way to find them, other than manually selecting and then deselecting each image in turn?

 

Maybe I've been lucky? I've almost always used commas between keywords and rarely got close the character counts in main and comprehensive in the old MI.

 

I select all the images in a submission at the same time and then look for mega-tags in the greyed-out area. Of course, I then have to go through the images one-by-one in order to find exactly which ones have been affected. No way I'll ever correct them all, so hopefully the new, super-intelligent search engine will be able to figure things out.

 

Excellent, thanks - why didn't I think of that? That's much quicker. I've now checked 2 years of submissions and haven't found any mega-tags yet. Only 5 more years to go 

[spacecadet]

Crikey, there are dozens of the blighters. Fortunately not many of mine appear to be too badly garbled.

[Martin P Wilson]

I haven't checked. I am not going to bother chasing optimisation of the moveable feast that is AIM and the search algorithm, for me Alamy is not worth any effort until it settles down. I'll focus my efforts elsewhere (like my writing).

 

No doubt some stability will come in time, at that point I will revisit my portfolio.

[Arletta]

Oh boy, I wanted to check something in my image so went to the manage area and found this! More and more images are loosing their green status for orange. Just like that. I know there's a mess with last "improvements" on Alamy so I don't bother with any work on tagging until all the bugs and glitches are fixed.

 

Now, many of the keywords are like one binded, example: 

 

• Europe horizontal people clients few many square collection

 

 

Yup, that were separated words, now they are one keyword/ tag! 

 

Captions. For some images I needed to add more words to describe the image. For this reason I used shorter titles. Now I have captions which have cut my descriptions... A sentence is cut and makes no sense. Amazing! 

 

Improvement process is finished or should I expect more exciting surprises?

 

And as Martin said - Alamy is not worth any effort until it settles down. Lets say I have to spend 2 (two minutes) for each image to re-edit it. If I want to work for 6 hours only doing this it would take me over 20 days! I won't earn enough here to make it worthwhile.

 

It's not about complaining. I'm just sooo [censored] frustraded with the changes!