keywords for nature photography?

[FishMan473]

I am an ecologist who dabbles in fine photography. I also do a lot of shooting to record the plants and animals I see and to collect images to help others learn to ID plants and animals, such as you might have in a field guide.

I am finally getting around to tagging all of my images (in Aperture) and I am wondering what people use as keywords for nature photography. Right now my current list of keywords is: scenic, bike, travel, wildlife, people, plant, insect, arthropod, fish, herp, bird, mammal, fungus, geology, fire, fruit, habitat

Are there other categories I should specify with additional keywords? I would love to see other peoples lists of keywords so I can get some ideas.

Also, for plants and animals I have the species names in the "Object Name" field but for plants and insects I would like to broaden this a bit by recording the Family or Order of the organism. Is the keyword field the best place for this, should I make a custom metadata field or is there a better place for this?

[mjs1973]

I find keywording to be a major pain in the butt, but it's one of those things that must be done if you have a large library of images. When it comes to plants I don't get too specific with my keywords. It's pretty much trees, leaves and flowers. Wildlife on the other hand I get much more specific. deer, squirrel, rabbit, bear, beaver, eagle, sparrow, orirole, loon etc. Insects are kind of the same way only not nearly as many categories for me. Butterfly, moth, beetle, spicer are a few that I use and I also have a generic one called 'bug' for when I don't know what it is, or care enough to look it up. Landscape photos fall into a category I have labeled scenic. The keywords under this category give a general description of the scene. Mountains, river, lake, pond, field, barn etc. I also have a group for the seasons. If I have an image that represents fall really well, I label it fall. Same thing with winter, spring and summer.

There are more that I use, it just depends on what the particular image represents for me.

[drg]

I am an ecologist who dabbles in fine photography. I also do a lot of shooting to record the plants and animals I see and to collect images to help others learn to ID plants and animals, such as you might have in a field guide.

I am finally getting around to tagging all of my images (in Aperture) and I am wondering what people use as keywords for nature photography. Right now my current list of keywords is: scenic, bike, travel, wildlife, people, plant, insect, arthropod, fish, herp, bird, mammal, fungus, geology, fire, fruit, habitat

Are there other categories I should specify with additional keywords? I would love to see other peoples lists of keywords so I can get some ideas.

Also, for plants and animals I have the species names in the "Object Name" field but for plants and insects I would like to broaden this a bit by recording the Family or Order of the organism. Is the keyword field the best place for this, should I make a custom metadata field or is there a better place for this?

In 'Object Name' are you altering the actual original physical file name (I think that is an 'auto' option for that field) or creating a new 'meta' object name? The reason I ask it seems like I ran into a problem when using Aperture last year trying to do something like that. Could be I'm thinking of another standard field.

Consider have multiple sets of keywords that could be top labeled as flora, fauna, people, colleagues, etc, that then may contain subsets of meta-data that can even be customized to the point of being unique to a particular image.

Are you including location, geo-tagged or not, as a search-able field?

Be sure to have ways to search for an image not only on subject but also of course date and time (which is built in obviously), location, a trip reference or even a grant or project ID.

As you indicate you are using this a visual library or basis for a field guide, also include season for plants (a second date filed set up for month or just use Spring Summer Fall & Winter). Then for animals you might think about adding 'juvenile' or similar.

Nature items can also be further denoted with 'variants'. I live in an area with multiple squirrel 'colors' and a high number of albino occurrences that could be 'tagged'.

Whether you use keywords or meta objects the ideas is to create a 'taxonomy', if you will, that you can remember and use. The more specifics you can add for each image originally the greater than chance of finding it or being able to reference it in the future!!

Best wishes and Happy New Year!

[FishMan473]

Thanks guys, this has been really helpful so far.

I wonder if there is a way to automatically generate a "season" or "month" tag based on the date? It would be easy enough to do once every few months as a season passes though.

[GB1]

I would recommend key wording the way it helps you find things. I like your categories, but think you can include location, event, date (month and year), specific name of the model, etc. For example, I participated in a model shoot at a studio a few months ago and in addition to "model", I used "J Street Studio", "October 2009" and "Zarina" key words also. This covers all the bases.

In your particular situation, I think it's important to keyword by specific plant name, if you know it. This way you can find and pull up specific images, and it will also assist you in remembering esoteric plant names.