What a nice occasion to say hello to all folks interested in the software development of picurl – tagging reinvented. Ok, so you found out it’s all about adding and organizing tags for digital images. Correct, but not too exciting at first sight, you might think. Here are some aspects of motivation for us:
- We do believe that tagging is the most exciting way of organizing digital content today. Instead of thinking in a linear way – namely, by putting single files into distinct single folders on your hard drive – adding tags to files turns them into being multi-dimensional.
- Metadata is there, why not use it? Think of all the details your operating systems adds to an image at the time of creation or change of the file. Or the options given (or denied) by your preferred image editing tool, based on some particular file information.
- Being bound to tagging capabilities of specific web 2.0 photo services might turn out annoying. To make this clear: We do love the services, their generous user policy and the ease of creating a personal space for your images. The gap is all about incorporating different systems into one (personal) way of working with tags.
- What about different languages for the terms used as tags? Do we always have to stick to English or Latin for that? Or even worse, guess a tag with our somehow limited knowledge of expert vocabulary? This is where semantics come in handy.
You see, there are numerous concepts (and much more) to think about. That’s why we started picurl. This first quarter of the project – obviously being the last of 2007 – turned out über-exciting in delving into the world of concepting, organzing, defining, discussing, cheering each other on reaching small milestones and overall finding together as a team. And yes, we’ll promise to keep you updated more often from now, stay tuned and season’s greetings.