What are Tags? 
Tags are keywords associated with a photo on this site. While the title of a photo may be “Mt. Ubinas, Peru” the tags could read “volcano mountain erupt active volcanic Peru South America Ubinas lava crater sulphur” (&, I’m sure, many more). Try to keep them as relevant as possible to the photograph concerned. You could also include the type of camera you used e.g. “cameraphone” or “Canon 350D” (though if the file has exif info still attached the site will use this information to generate automatic tags). Helpful tags include the context (transport, travel, landscape, nature, weather, architecture etc.) & the subject (volcano, beach, shop etc.). The location need not be included as it is already entered on the map & text already written in your description need not be repeated as it is also included in the search.
Why use Tags? 
The whole idea behind uploading pictures to a site like this is for people to see them. Tags are not obligatory but they allow complex searches to find more relevant material, so more people will see your photo if correctly tagged. For example a person might do a search on “Volcanos of South America” & it will now return the above example whereas without the tagging it would have been missed. Similarly a search on “Pentax” would hopefully return all of the tagged photo’s taken with a Pentax camera. Please remember that irrelevant tags will create frustration & are less likely to generate views in the long run.
Can I add to the Tags on my photo’s? 
Yes, just go to the “edit my photo” button, add or edit the tags & save your changes when you’re done.
So please… Start Tagging…
