In forum #183129, 1:1 was going to be invalidated but was kept for consistency, as if 16:9 was kept then so should 1:1.

The problem is that there's a lot of ratios that *could* be tagged, but should they?

Obviously tagging an image that's 1920x1081 as a ratio of 1920:1081 is a bit too much, so where do we draw the line?

For my tagbot, I was tagging every non-overlapping ratio from 1:1 to 30:30, as I figured that if someone wanted to search for a ratio that I didn't think to tag, then they'd still be able to find it. The problem with that is that there's 555 of them, so a lot won't be ratios that people would use for anything.

(For clarification, non-overlapping meaning that 30:30 wouldn't be counted as it's the same as 1:1)

There's also the argument that the metatag "ratio:" can be used instead, however 16:9 is 1.77 recurring, which gets rounded to 1.78, and therefore doesn't contain 'only' 16:9 images.

I've decided to wait till I've got some feedback here, preferably from an admin as well, before I tag anything else.

I am for only tagging a small subset of the ratios. My thought is they are only useful to find backgrounds, icons, and maybe something else. Because of this thought, tags such as 28:23 are not useful.

I'm not sure this means that they shouldn't get tagged though. Many people complained about ratte's work on species implications saying Why would we ever need all these species. And I agree with them to an extent. I'm not really sure of the difference between equid and equine .

But I think the same line of thinking applies here. Even if I'm never going to search for equid , it should still be tagged.

I am for a wider range of ratios to tag, but I think we need a reason to tag them.

Here is some further reading for anyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_aspect_ratio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Filmaspectratios_svg.svg/300px-Filmaspectratios_svg.svg.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Vector_Video_Standards8.svg/1200px-Vector_Video_Standards8.svg.png

I made a quick little thing to find the number of posts that each ratio tag should be tagged with. This includes all ratios that have over ten valid posts and have a ratio with both numbers less than one thousand.

https://hatebin.com/jyutcqzawr

I'd prefer a smaller subset as well, however there's a lot of ratios that look odd, but people actually use.

For example, after a quick google, 11x14 is apparently used for some photos, and 15x24 returns a site selling art frames, the first having 1049 reviews, so clearly that ratio is used by some people, despite originally looking a bit stupid.

I feel tagging 555 ratios would be a bit much, but only tagging ones we think people would want would definitely miss a lot. It's highly unlikely, but someone could have an odd sized frame and check here for safe art that could go in it, not to mention there's lots of really good artwork on here that's not sexual at all.

With your count of ratios, the 22nd with 3300 posts, is 22:17. It's still a lot of posts, but again, isn't something I'd ever think to tag normally.

The other thing is that although you can easily argue there's not much point in tagging them, you can also say there's no point not tagging them either.

I thought about only tagging from the top x on the list you posted, but then there could be common ratios that people simply haven't posted here. And I'd agree with needing a reason to tag a specific ratio, but when there's 555 possible ones, we can't search them all to see if anything uses it, and it'd turn into, "these are tagged because I've heard of them," rather than, "these are tagged because they're used by people."

It's one reason I'm hoping for an admin to give some kind of ruling on these, to say whether they should be tagged or not, as some people feel we shouldn't miss a ratio in case someone searches it, and others say we should only tag certain ones, but those "certain ones" aren't set to specific tags, making this a bit of a grey area.

One alternative could be to make the current "ratio:" metatag work with more decimal places. I'd estimate that 4-5 decimal places should be enough for pixel perfect ratios, then you could remove all ratio tags and only use the metatag.

1920/1080 - 1.777777
1920/1079 - 1.779425
1921/1080 - 1.778703
1920/1081 - 1.776133

Looking at that, you could have the 4th decimal be rounded, and still be accurate.

With the site allowing up to 15000x15000:

15000/14999 - 1.000066
15000/14998 - 1.000133
14999/15000 - 0.999933
14998/15000 - 0.999866

Which looks like it'd need 5 decimal places, with the fifth being rounded, to accurately give pixel perfect ratios.

Obviously it'd make things a bit more awkward, with having to figure out the decimal ratio and then see if the 4th/5th decimal is rounded up or down, but it'd avoid ratio tags altogether.

A quick edit:
What would be even better is after changing to 5 decimal places, make it so that when someone searches for {number}:{number}, then the site divides the numbers to get a decimal ratio, then searches for that instead. That way people can search with "normal" ratios, and still get the correct result, and there'd be no need for tagging them at all.

It could be coded into the search or added to a bit of javascript, to change 16:9 to "ratio:1.77778". Of course, if it's being handled by the site, you could always code it to more decimal places, as it'd auto-convert.

Second edit:
It'd actually need to be greater than five for all ratios:
1/15000 - 0.00006666666
1/14999 - 0.00006667111

Which would need 9 decimal places.

I imagine implementing that might take a bit of work but it'd make ratio tags irrelevant, and any ratio searched, decimal or fractional, would return the correct images, so that'd get a massive +1 from me.

Sorry for the bump, I just realised with my added suggestion being an edit, people that read it before wouldn't see the added bit, so wanted to mark the thread as having a new post. I really think the suggestion in my edit could sort out all these ratio tags, while not needing to tag any of them anymore.

It could also be argued that ratio:x.xx isn't enough decimal places to really give a specific ratio, without including other resolutions, but having 9 decimal places, or 10 just to be sure, and having the site convert "16:9" to "ratio:1.7777777778" automatically, would solve all the problems to do with ratios.

They couldn't be untagged or seen as pointless, as there wouldn't be any, yet you could still search for them, including any and all fractional ratios that you could want, including the ridiculous "1920x1081".

And I know it's generally bad to ask, but could an admin say if this was being discussed? I guess it's just a feature that I really think would be great to add to the site, and fix a lot of problems with these kind of tags..