Brace yourselves: tags are coming

It's finally time. Tags galore incoming

Tags have, at this point, been a long time coming. The reason is that we wanted to do it right, with tags belonging to pages, not albums, for improved filtering and searching. And on top of that, we wanted a way to tag videos as well.

The problem was that we couldn't possibly put in the required man hours to do this, as we have literally hundreds of thousands of pages and a few thousand minutes of videos. It would be a huge undertaking.

Our secret weapon

We used our knowledge and experience within the world of tech to set up a high-performance, relatively accurate, and highly detailed machine learning algorithm to go through and tag each image on our servers.

Admittedly though, we did not tune it as much as we could have, in an effort to more quickly bring tags to the platform, at the cost of those tags taking longer to add. It was a trade-off we willingly accepted so that we could focus our efforts on improving other parts of the site, while our little machine does its job.

The expected timeline

In an effort to provide the best possible set of initial tags, we want to do a few more tests and tweaks before we release the algorithm to do its thing, but we expect to have it running by the end of the week.

That said, it's important to note that, as previously mentioned, it will take upwards of a couple of months before it's finished, so we'll be taking our time implementing the actual tagging features on the site itself. Tags will become visible starting next week though, so that you'll at least have a chance to see what contents of what you're about to view.

Note that we have yet to decide if we'll run it against albums or videos first.

Next steps

Tags will be implemented in a couple of steps, namely...

• Showing the tags on albums and videos, including the number of pages/seconds with that content tag
• Filtering album pages by their tags to quickly see your favourites
• Showing only albums/videos that contain specific tags, first individually and then by multiple at once
• Blacklisting tags to avoid seeing what you'd rather not - this may be delayed until later though

Until next time...

We'll try to keep these posts up, perhaps improving their quality a bit if we figure out how to be better writers. It's a good way for us to be held accountable and to include you, the user, in what we're working on.

Time for us to crawl back into our code editors. Thanks for reading, Scholars.