So, I've recently been contacted by an artist for whom I sometimes post things for. They were upset with me about not adding proper tags to my posts and said that their artwork doesn't do as well when not tagged properly. so my question is, what exactly is proper? have I not been adding enough tags to my posts this whole time? why didn't someone tell me sooner?
now I know the clear answer here is "add as many tags you can think of, ya dummy" and I know that, but I honestly feel like I add a very adequate amount of tags and I always remember to tag the artist of course. But obviously I'm doing something wrong considering I was just directly contacted by an upset artist, which is something I never wanted to happen. So does anyone have any advice on what I should do?

Well, which post was it?

Queen_Tyr'ahnee said:
Well, which post was it?

they didn't specify. I just assumed it was all of them.

the artist in question is miso_souperstar

You could try finding the tags that the artist used for the picture and then apply as many of them as you can. That way they can’t complain because you are using the same tags that they are.

Well after looking at your uploads of their work they seem to be sufficiently tagged as of now. I guess when it comes to tags you should always try to do: artist, year, gender, species, body characteristics, actions being performed, language, objects, et cetera.

I'm not the most thorough tagger but I try to tag all I can see and think of. Usually the order is something like: artist, gender, species, body features, objects in the picture, sex positions, anything other.

Autumn-Ferret said:
they didn't specify. I just assumed it was all of them.

the artist in question is miso_souperstar

Here's one example for that artist I see. post #1545472 They went ahead and tagged a whole ton of stuff themselves where you had the minimum tags.

My tagging checklist:

Obviously you aren't expected to tag all of that. And hey, even I don't tag all of that most of the time.

I tried to generally organize it from most important to least important, though note that if there's any major fetishes or other questionable content involved, that becomes very important to tag.

If I had to give a short-list of the most important stuff to make sure to include, it would be:

Artist
Characters
Species
Orientation stuff (form / gender)
Number of characters
Major Fetishes

If you want to go a bit further, the next most important category would be most of the stuff in the "sex" category.

Animation / Comic is pretty useful for searching purposes too.

From there, there's a pretty steep drop-off in importance - the rest of the stuff is useful to have tagged, but not anywhere on the same level as the stuff mentioned above.

Clawdragons said:

If I had to give a short-list of the most important stuff to make sure to include, it would be:

Artist
Characters
Species
Orientation stuff (form / gender)
Number of characters
Major Fetishes

If you want to go a bit further, the next most important category would be most of the stuff in the "sex" category.

Animation / Comic is pretty useful for searching purposes too.

From there, there's a pretty steep drop-off in importance - the rest of the stuff is useful to have tagged, but not anywhere on the same level as the stuff mentioned above.

I would add physical characteristics, such as eye color, hair color, stripes, spots, etc., in there as well. It makes finding a specific picture easier.

SharkFetish said:
I would add physical characteristics, such as eye color, hair color, stripes, spots, etc., in there as well. It makes finding a specific picture easier.

Those are nowhere near as important though. Yes, they are useful, and you should include them if you don't mind spending the time, but I feel it's necessary to draw a distinction between them and the things I mentioned.

If you made a scale from 1-10 of importance, my shortlist contains all the stuff that I think is a 9 or 10. The sex category mostly covers from 6-7, and physical characteristics is down near 5.

forum #255867 - How much should you tag?

Based on Miso_Souperstar additions to your uploads (see tag history) you should work on tagging species (see post #1545472, post #1543379) and body parts (see post #1545473, post #1537647), and also body type and clothing.

Yeah, leomole has a good list.
Personally, I'd also add the background (simple_background/detailed_background) and locale (inside/outside/bedroom/forest/beach/etc).

Those are handy for finding specific posts that you've 'lost', far more useful than color tags and such since colors are frequently either mistagged or not tagged at all. Whereas the background tags are rarely mistagged, and are applicable to any post.

leomole said:

Category	Example	Example	Example	Example
For blacklisting	gore	obese	cub	not_furry

Don't forget human child or humanoid child for images that are not_furry as you can't tag cub for those ones.

While Miso_souperstar's additions are not *required* by the rules, you should try to respect their wishes in that regard. After all, they're allowing us to have the posts here. and a poorly tagged piece of artwork isn't seen by anyone after it slides off the front page.

The point of tags is to help people find artwork they want. The point of tags is to help people remove artwork they don't want. tags are not a formality or annoying requirement. tags are the core of this website. <3 If someone tries to view every image every day, then they'll see every post probably. but most people probably do a search, like "female" or "breasts" or "fellatio" to get what they want.

Looking at post #1545472 ... you should certainly try to use more tags than 'balls breasts dickgirl eyes_closed intersex (character) (artist) nude oral public' That's.... kind of the barest minimum.

There is no mention of there being a penis, a blow job, nipples, and those are kinda important. As are species, and pairing information Not to mention, you didn't even tag the other one's gender.

It's good rule of thumb to try and tag all sexy body parts, and at least basic position information, if characters are anthro or feral or what... <3

Also make sure you're tagging the genders of all of the characters in a post. It's really hard for users/taggers to find posts that have only one character of a duo or group tagged. I.E. if you tag male_penetrating also include the character that he's penetrating with male/male, male/female, male/dickgirl etc.

I admit I kinda TL;DR some messages, but in general there's always more tags that can be applied to posts and more tags means more people who have blacklisted specific content will not see it and in future some searching for that specific content will find it.

There have been cases where I have tried to find image, just to realize that it doesn't have something tagged like white_background for example which then didn't include the image in my search.

SnowWolf said:
Looking at post #1545472 ... you should certainly try to use more tags than 'balls breasts dickgirl eyes_closed intersex (character) (artist) nude oral public' That's.... kind of the barest minimum.

....yeah, looking at the initial tags and tag edits, that's kinda painful to watch so I can fully understand if artist is kinda negative about that one.