What is a tag? What is it for?
Tags, which can also be called "keywords" or "labels", are an important tool to easily organize, describe, and find your photos: in other words, to index them.
In Piwigo, a file can be associated to an unlimited number of tags.
Tags are a good way to organize your photo library, in addition to albums, with several key differences:
- Albums are organized in a tree structure, just like the files on your computer, and they are used to browse your gallery in a logical way: for example, if you are searching for a photo of a tulip, you will first go to the "Plants" album, then the "Flowers" sub-album.
- Tags allow you to explore the content of all albums, by displaying all photos that fit one or more criteria; indeed, we can combine multiple tags to search for a specific element.
How does one use tags?
Tags have multiple uses and multiple ways of being used.
Search engine
First of all, when typing in a search in your gallery's search engine, or in Piwigo's administration, tag labels are taken into account: therefore, this is a way to easily find photos that fit a criterion. You can also use the filter search bar to search photos linked to one or several tags. Learn more about search in Piwigo
Tag cloud
Next, you can display a tag cloud in your gallery: the size of each word is proportional to the number of files associated with this tag.
One click on a tag lets you show the list of all photos associated with this tag.
Related tags
Every Piwigo gallery contains a "Related tags" menu by default.
This menu shows the list of tags associated with the current selection.
If you choose a tag in the list, you will show all photos that correspond to this tag.
If you hover the mouse once again over the "Related tags" menu, you will only see the tags associated with the current selection: you can then choose a new tag, which will refine your search, and a third one if you want to, as we can see in the example below.
To learn more about how to use tags on your gallery, read the following article:
Tags in your galleryExample of tag use: the Piwigo demo gallery n°1
Let's take the example of the first Piwigo demo gallery: https://demo1.piwigo.com/
The photos are organized in a logical manner in albums and sub-albums, which shows how organized a gallery can be:
- One album per collection, each collection corresponding to an object or a concept;
- One album per object category
- One album per species
- etc.
In turn, tags are used to describe the content.
This way, we can easily find all blue pictures, across all albums, simply by searching for the "blue" tag.
But we can also refine our search by combining the "blue" + "building" tags, to find all blue building pictures.
Article summary
- What is a tag? What is it for?
- How does one use tags?
- Search engine
- Tag cloud
- Related tags
- Example of tag use: the Piwigo demo gallery n°1
Next →
Creating and managing tags