I want to go on a Great Tag Drive through my palettes. (Yes. Procrastination time strikes again). But I was wondering what kinds of tags to people find useful? Colour names of the dominant colour in the palette? Inspirations like "floral" or "music" ? Descriptions like "dark", "warm" etc?

What do you search for?

Another question is - what does the keyword search include? For example, is it redundant to tag a palette as "sushi" if the title or one of the colours, or the palette description says "sushi"?

that's a really good question, klip.

i'm pretty sure the keyword is only palette names or tags, not individual colors, but let me check......

yep, just palettes (including description!), tags, but not individual color names.

so, yes, it would be redundant to tag a palette called 'Sushi' as 'Sushi'

but i always do it anyway for some reason.

as soon as i finish a palette, i race to the tags and start with the title, the colors, moods, etc. i do it for myself, too. it makes it very easy to go back and look for something i made. (which is helpful when you have a boatload to sift through..)

Cool! Thanks for finding that out.

Ive been lazy about it. When I do remember to tag, I like tagging my palettes according to a season, for some reason. If I feel they are winter, summer, autumn or spring palettes, or hot, or cold, dark or pale.

Ive seen all kinds of tags though.

i do think most palettes can be tagged as a season.

i do that a lot too.

for a lot of my palettes i used the tag music because it was inspired music. I know I also have a few tagged as simpsons and a few as fall or autumn also.

I was also wondering about the size of tags. I assumed that a big tag means that lots of people have used that word for a tag - but now I notice that on some of my palettes the word "red" is quite small, and on some its quite big. What's that about?

klip wrote:

I was also wondering about the size of tags. I assumed that a big tag means that lots of people have used that word for a tag - but now I notice that on some of my palettes the word "red" is quite small, and on some its quite big. What's that about?

It depends on your other tags. If you have red & green for example in your tags, red will be smaller because in the context of "green", it is less used. If you have red & peach in your tags, red will obviously appear larger.

I mostly use tags as a category system for my own palettes, but to retro tag them now would be quite a job

You don't really need to tag things "warm" "dark" etc or anything based on the colour hues, because the palette search algorithm already knows which palettes are warm, dark, mostly green, etc (which makes our job easier), unless you want to override the calculations, or for example if you check "red" and "green" in the search criteria, it'll return red palettes and green palettes, so I've tagged a lot of mine with "redandgreen" so it only returns palettes with both (my fave complimentary scheme).

Lovers have consistently used the same tags for easy navigation, e.g. mravka tags his very favourites with "mfavourites" so he and everyone else can easily browse them. "bobaward" was started by peachbelle and is used to tag stellar "best of the best" nominee palettes.

I personally tag a lot of the palettes which reach #1 with "numberones" for easy reference late (word has it they'll be officially indexed later) and all my tribute colours/palettes have the tag "lovers" and anyone else can do the same for easy, fun exploration. Tags are useful for cross-referencing with groups (225, VCC, milestones, etc).

Inspiration (like despise was saying with "music") is a very interesting tagging system, and variations on title words can help searchers find palettes in line with what they're looking for even if the words aren't identical (I tag palettes about cats with "animals" etc).

Mais je diverge..... be creative with your tagging, and post your ideas here so we're clued in ;)

I just revisited one of my favorites (Tiger Spot Frog) and noticed that it had been tagged "palettewhoring." What does that mean? Doesn't sound very nice at all, which surprises me on this forum.

People do surprising things when they're guaranteed anonymity. There has been some conflict lately over the use of palette badges as veritable advertising campaigns for one's work. It's created kind of a different atmosphere here. Where the line is drawn between sharing and scorewhoring, I don't know. But that's likely where it comes from.

The palettewhoring tag seems to be one that Fazai38 uses for his own palettes; not sure I understand it exactly, but it doesn't seem to be a negative thing.

OK - so I'm wasting my time tagging things as warm, cool, cold, bright, dark, etc? And it should just be used as a sort of personal indexing system? OK - I wonder how many people realize that.

I would like to put a section on tagging in the "Sharing the love group" conversation on palette tags and searching. Could some one tell me a little more about how the palette search algorithm works in terms of what it includes already and therefore you dont have to tag?

Sorry, klip, I was mistaken. The colour search parameters include light, dark, warm, cool, and saturated and neutral. The palette search only includes hue parameters, and you can select only one hue parameter per search. I really don't know how it calculates - would a palette with just one orange colour be included in the search? And where does "orange" begin and end? A search for "orange" palettes returned

and a few others which only satisfy "orange" if you figure that some of the colours are in the very very desaturated spectrum of orange. They're very broadly defined, which I think is less useful, but someone else might want that.
A few pairing parameters like "black and white" and "pink and blue" have been added, but seem to calculated what's included in the results in different ways.

So anyway, je diverge, and yes it looks like it's worth your while to tag light and dark and warm and neutral and so on for palettes. I hope maybe we get a "red and green" search parameter soon :D


I guess it would require a pretty sophisticated algorithm to calculate the overall warmth or darkness, etc., of a palette across its colours.