How do I merge tags ?

[boblite]

I started out with separate tags for Birds and Quadrupeds

Now I'd like to merge these into a single category

Birds & quadrupeds

to reduce the number of tags.

Will greatly appreciate advice on how to do this.

[Jean-Luc]

You may display and select all images of birds (easy to to if you ask to display the images with tag "Birds"), remove the tag Bird and replace with tag Birds & quadrupeds. Do the same with Quadrupeds.

[boblite]

Hi Jean-Luc: Many thanks for your reply.

I am beginning to think I made a huge mistake when I created tags with common words ---

On the fly and with very little advance thinking I created a tag "Birds" and a tag "Birds & mammals" thinking these would be entirely separate categories so that if I dragged an image to the tag "Birds" it would be listed only under the tag "Birds".

What happened surprised me.

I found that if I dragged an image containing just a mammal into "Birds & mammals", that image would also get listed under the tag "Birds". I also (with bad future consequences) created a tag "bird" to denote a single bird in the image. I found that everything tagged "bird" was also listed under tag "Birds" and also listed under tag "Birds & Mammals". In retrospect this does not work well in PSP. It would have been much better to have a tag "Birds" and a tag "Mammals" and no tag containing both words "Birds" and "Mammals". To avoid any confusion like this I am currently resolved to attach only one tag to a particular image, and to describe additional features, to use captions and not tags.

Consider the case where images contain either a Mammal, a Bird, or a Bird AND a Mammal.

In this simple case you could show a detailed list of tags on the computer screen that cover all possible cases without too much difficulty, as follows:

== Birds
== Mammals
== Birds & Mammals

But suppose there are also images of cars -- the list of tags on the computer screen gets much messier...

== Birds
== Mammals
== Cars
== Birds & Mammals
== Birds & Cars
== Mammals & Cars
== Birds & Cars & Mammals

This kind of scheme is messy but might make sense if there was no search function.

But if we use just one tag, and add additional information using captions, we can have a list of tags on the computer screen that contain just three tags, Birds, Mammals and Cars, and avoid horribly long lists of tags that enumerate every possibility. So if we want to see images containing both Birds and Mammals, the search term "birds mammals" shows us a list of all these images as a temporary subset, (or maybe a permanent subset if we so choose) but without complicating our initial sorting through of images with a horribly elaborate list of all the possible categories.

The reason we have the concept "Tags" is purely to describe the main categories that are of interest to the end user, to provide a sort of reminder on what categories are important, so that one does fall into the trap of endlessly creating additional categories. Instead if some feature looks important but is not worth a category of its own, it can get described by a caption. BTW, it would be nice if PSP would present an alphabetized list of all captions used, to remind the end user what search terms can be used in addition to the tag names. So if you had tags "Birds", "Mammals", "Cars" you could arbitrarily add captions not using these terms, like "dead" or "fast" or additional nouns like "House", and see that these terms were in the list of possible search terms.

Please forgive this lengthy discussion. I am not asking you to respond to it. It has helped clarify my mind a great deal, and I post it in hopes that it might be helpful to other users. Most likely I am just restating ideas described elsewhere.

/------------------------------

P.S. PSP seems to work only with single words and not with groups of words ?? Could I say "children_playing" as a caption or a tag ?

[boblite]

Oh, and maybe my lengthy discussion instead reveals that I am still somewhat confused as to how PSP really works.

[Jean-Luc]

PSP doesn't have a hierarchy for tags. They are all on the same level.
But you can make your own.
Image may contain many tags.
If you have an image with an eagle, you may add the following tags separately: Animals, Birds, Eagle
When your images are tagged, you may search for Animals only, Birds only or Eagle.

See also this discussion :
viewtopic.php?f=56&t=63569