Topic: [Feature] "Colors" tag group

Posted under Site Bug Reports & Feature Requests

Requested feature overview description.

We currently have tag groups for Artists, Characters, Species, General, and Meta. I've noticed that "General" can be very large sometimes, so if there was a way to divide it up further, that would be nice.

This proposal is for creating a new tag group called "Colors", and I propose placing it between General and Meta. These tags can often be clutter when trying to look at the list of tags if you only care about the main topics, or vice versa if you want to browse more characters with the same colors, it would be easier if the colors were separate.

Why would it be useful?

I'll use post #2338448 as an example, since it involves characters with many different colors. The following tags (16) would be placed into the "Colors" tag group:

black_body black_feathers black_sclera blue_eyes blue_mane blue_tail_feathers green_body green_feathers grey_body grey_feathers orange_body orange_feathers tan_body white_body yellow_body yellow_feathers

This would leave the following tags (39) in the "General" tag group:

3_toes 4_ears anthro anthro_on_anthro anthro_penetrated anthro_penetrating anthro_penetrating_anthro blurred_background cunnilingus detailed_background eyes_closed feathers female female/female female_penetrated genitals group male male/female male_penetrating male_penetrating_female mane multi_ear nude oral penetration penis pussy sex tail_tuft toes tongue tongue_out tuft vaginal vaginal_penetration wings

So the "Colors" section for this image would have a bit under half as many tags as "General", a sizeable section indeed. In the current state of the color tags being merged with "General", the color tags are about 30% of the tags.

Of course, not all posts would be like this one. Some posts would have more, probably most would have less, but I think this is a big enough category that it's worth splitting off.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?

Primarily the left sidebar's list of tags when viewing a post, but also the tag would change color when browsing/searching through posts.

WDYT?

Updated

Yeah, I think having a 'color' tag category (and possibly a 'clothing' tag category) would be beneficial. However, since it took a while for the 'lore' and 'meta' tag categories to be implemented, it'll probably be a while before any new tag categories are implemented.

Bump, I still think this feature would be very useful. A post can have lots of color tags, and it seems silly to have these mixed in with the non-color tags. I added some color tags on post #3159710 and now most of the general tags are color tags.

Yep, looking for general tags in a clutter of color tags can be pretty annoying, especially if colors are well tagged. Take a look at this beauty: post #3143453!

Would definitely be a bit easier on the eyes if they had their own group.

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I don't see how it would help much since the tags would still be visible. If anything, it would make it worse since it's yet another tag header (lengthening the tag list with extra space and more lines), and another tag type, tag color, etc, to manage. Also would monotone_*, two_tone_*, multicolored_*, rainbow_*, etc, count as "color" tags? They're not color themselves, just an indication of how many colors are present on the thing. With some of the tagging jobs I've seen, having a separate Colors group wouldn't help the clutter; people who would tag colors a lot also tend to tag every possible minutia of the image, overloading the tag list in a way that no amount of separate groups would help make sense of the list.

watsit said:
I don't see how it would help much since the tags would still be visible. ...Also would monotone_*, two_tone_*, multicolored_*, rainbow_*, etc, count as "color" tags?

Tag headers can be collapsed. Checking general tags for correctness would be easier without my eyes tripping on colors, and vice versa. I think all color-related tags should be put into "color" category.

waydence said:
Tag headers can be collapsed.

Which is a deliberate action you have to do, they're still there by default. And if you're looking over the list for missing or invalid tags, the color tags are just as relevant to check as anything else.

waydence said:
I think all color-related tags should get their own category.

So socks_(marking), gloves_(marking), striped_body/fur/scales/feathers, spotted_body/fur/scales/feathers, dipstick_tail, dipstick_ears, heterochromia, and other tags like that should be in the "color-related" tags, since they're related to colors? How many tags would actually end up in this category?

thegreatwolfgang said:
I'm sorry for being thorough with my tagging.

Thank you for your service. While at it, may I introduce you to countershading?

watsit said:
Which is a deliberate action you have to do, they're still there by default. And if you're looking over the list for missing or invalid tags, the color tags are just as relevant to check as anything else.

Maybe your brain works differently, but I find it disruptive having to scroll below the picture to check. Search doesn't really help with that.

watsit said:
So socks_(marking), gloves_(marking), striped_body/fur/scales/feathers, spotted_body/fur/scales/feathers, dipstick_tail, dipstick_ears, heterochromia, and other tags like that should be in the "color-related" tags, since they're related to colors? How many tags would actually end up in this category?

Perhaps tags that directly imply colors? The main source of clutter, like *_body (fur, feathers, scales, hair), *_background, *_clothing etc. But not stuff that technically works with greyscale, like markings. Hopefully more people will express their opinion.

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waydence said:
Maybe your brain works differently, but I find it somewhat disruptive having to scroll below the picture to check. Search doesn't help all that much.

I find it a problem, too. If I have to scroll away from the picture to check if a tag is there, or if I have to scroll back to the picture to check the validity of a tag, and the shear number of things being tagged, that makes it harder to ensure proper tagging, and especially when each tag looks very similar to the ones its next to, which makes me prone to misreading or overlooking them. However, this is a more general problem of overtagging, and tagging obvious/expected things (we generally don't tag expected things, or tags that have a direct opposite, like eyes_open/eyes; eyes being open/visible is going to be true 99.9% of the time, so there's no real use in tagging it, and there's the eyes_closed tag if you want to find the outliers).

post #3143453 and post #3325236 are good examples here. There are so many individual things tagged, many things which are obvious/expected (like monotone_leash or monotone_glans, as if there's such an abundance of multicolored leashes and glans and they're necessary to separate from the plain leash and glans tags), that it makes verification impossible. As a result, for example, many posts that have monotone_eyes are mistags (it's tagged on a lot of posts that have monotone pupils, again another obvious/expected thing, but have different color sclera and irises, rather than truly monotone eyes where the sclera, pupil, and iris are the same base color), but they're hard to realize as its often buried in long tag lists along side a bunch of other monotone_* tags. The second post is a proper use of monotone_eyes, while the first one is difficult to tell given its size and blurry background details (the clearer foreground details at least would not warrant the tag), but is tagged anyway, and is easy to overlook in the tag list to correct.

I don't think putting color-related tags into a separate group will actually help all that much, since when the color tags become a problem, the tag list as a whole is going to be excessive; there's still going to be a lot of both non-color and color tags that require scrolling back and forth even with the other sections collapsed. Tags that are easy to overlook next to similarly-named tags, are going to congregate into the same groups anyway, keeping it unwieldy regardless.

waydence said:
Perhaps all tags that reference colors?

What do you mean by "reference colors"? To me, that would mean only tags like white_*, red_*, black_*, which are colors, and not monotone_*, two_tone_*, etc, since they aren't referencing any particular color. There's also tags like red_theme, blue_theme, greyscale, etc, which are color related, but are meta tags. Would they stay meta, or moved to this "colors" group?

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Never thought overtagging could be an actual problem.

watsit said:
What do you mean by "reference colors"? To me, that would mean only tags like white_*, red_*, black_*, which are colors, and not monotone_*, two_tone_*, etc, since they aren't referencing any particular color. There's also tags like red_theme, blue_theme, greyscale, etc, which are color related, but are meta tags. Would they stay meta, or moved to this "colors" group?

Tags that directly imply colors on particular things. Red_body says that body is red, multicolored_body implies that there are colors present on body. Meta tags are referring to the whole picture, so they can stay as they are, I think.

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watsit said:
I don't see how it would help much since the tags would still be visible. [...]

This group would make sense to have at the very bottom of the tag list, maybe even below the Meta group, or it could be above Meta. The point is to de-clutter the General group. Even when not collapsed, just moving these tags farther down will increase visibility for the other tags.

Overtagging is not the problem. Keeping lots of tags organized is the problem. This proposal helps with organization.

aaronfranke said:
The point is to de-clutter the General group. Even when not collapsed, just moving these tags farther down will increase visibility for the other tags.

You can make this argument about any tag group. Weight tags, genital tags, sex tags, pairing tags, etc; moving them down would increase visibility for the other tags. What makes color tags so special?

aaronfranke said:
Overtagging is not the problem. Keeping lots of tags organized is the problem. This proposal helps with organization.

If color tags are causing the tag list to be unwieldy, it is indeed an overtagging problem. You can organize the tags all you want, but ultimately there will be a lot of tags that make it nearly impossible to check over no matter how many separate groups you make (and the separate groups in fact making it worse). Most posts don't have a problem, but those that do are because someone added tags for every minute detail they could think of. If you aren't looking at the tag list, it won't matter, but if you are, separating the color tags is just as arbitrary as separating the clothing, sex, or fluid tags.

watsit said:
If color tags are causing the tag list to be unwieldy, it is indeed an overtagging problem. You can organize the tags all you want, but ultimately there will be a lot of tags that make it nearly impossible to check over no matter how many separate groups you make (and the separate groups in fact making it worse). Most posts don't have a problem, but those that do are because someone added tags for every minute detail they could think of. If you aren't looking at the tag list, it won't matter, but if you are, separating the color tags is just as arbitrary as separating the clothing, sex, or fluid tags.

I don't know why you are painting the whole thing as being a "problem".
Detailed tagging is very useful in finding posts through individually coloured body parts, especially when trying to find the originals from cropped artworks.

If it is unwieldy to the eyes, have it be collapsable as a tag group.
If it is hard to moderate, let those who are actively using the colour tags to fix any mistagging they find on their search results.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Detailed tagging is very useful in finding posts through individually coloured body parts, especially when trying to find the originals from cropped artworks.

Checking tags is also important, to ensure there are no glaring omissions or incorrect tags, which is hard to do when there are a lot of tags and each one looking similar to the several others around it. And with the more extremely specific tags that are only on a handful of posts that it could apply to, when there are slightly less precise but plenty useful tags that are just fine by themselves, aren't really serving their purpose.

thegreatwolfgang said:
If it is unwieldy to the eyes, have it be collapsable as a tag group.

Which as explained, won't help (there will still be a lot of tags to look through, and the similarly-named ones that make looking through it difficult will tend to congregate into the same group).

thegreatwolfgang said:
If it is hard to moderate, let those who are actively using the colour tags to fix any mistagging they find on their search results.

How many of these tags are actually being used for searching, and aren't just needlessly padding out the tag list for the sake of having more tags? How many are only used for searching on rare occasion, but have been filling up with mistags which went unnoticed by people who would've fixed them? As it is, monotone_eyes has been made useless by its rampant misuse, with monotone_breasts not too far behind, which no one who bothers to fix tags was able to catch since many misuses are buried alongside other similarly-named tags, and by the time it was noticed, it's too much to clean out. So rather than being useful for the occasion someone might've needed it, it's there on normal non-monotone instances where it serves no functional purpose.

That's why I'm painting it as a problem, because it's causing tags to go on being misused to the point of ruining them, and people like me who have a habit of checking the tags, are being hindered in fixing problems, be it missing or misused tags. If that's not a problem, I don't know what is.

watsit said:
How many of these tags are actually being used for searching, and aren't just needlessly padding out the tag list for the sake of having more tags? How many are only used for searching on rare occasion, but have been filling up with mistags which went unnoticed by people who would've fixed them? As it is, monotone_eyes has been made useless by its rampant misuse, with monotone_breasts not too far behind, which no one who bothers to fix tags was able to catch since many misuses are buried alongside other similarly-named tags, and by the time it was noticed, it's too much to clean out. So rather than being useful for the occasion someone might've needed it, it's there on normal non-monotone instances where it serves no functional purpose.

That's why I'm painting it as a problem, because it's causing tags to go on being misused to the point of ruining them, and people like me who have a habit of checking the tags, are being hindered in fixing problems, be it missing or misused tags. If that's not a problem, I don't know what is.

You cannot expect every single tag to be actively used in everyday searching, it would be very useful in times where examining a post in detail is necessary.

As for mistagging, I don't understand how something as simple as <color>_body_part would get misused. It is simple to understand and the people who tag them would most likely be the only ones using them.
Your assessment of monotone_eyes and monotone_breasts being misused is based off what definition? There is no wiki written for the both of them.
If we are following the conventional use of monotone_*, I would say that that would be the eyes and breasts that are monotone, whilst not considering the colour differences of the pupils/sclera or nipples/areola.

watsit said:
You can make this argument about any tag group. Weight tags, genital tags, sex tags, pairing tags, etc; moving them down would increase visibility for the other tags. What makes color tags so special?

Not really. They are special because they are a very large and easily identifiable group in general category. For every bodypart or object tag, there's a set of subtags in standart color palette.

Here's a definition I came up with:
Color tags are tags that directly describe coloration of things within picture.

So if it can only be identified on colored image, it's a color tag: red fur, rainbow body, green markings etc.
If it can be identified on greyscale image (or only suggests coloration), it's not a color tag: markings, countershading, heterochromia etc.
Metatags are metatags.

NGL though breaking up tags into further categories sounds appealing, I'll have to try it. Because the smaller the list, the easier it is to identify problems. Have a "colors" category, "actions" category, "bodyparts", "objects"...

Updated

thegreatwolfgang said:
You cannot expect every single tag to be actively used in everyday searching, it would be very useful in times where examining a post in detail is necessary.

When is that necessary to examine a post in detail to make it useful for searching? If someone's searching for a post, they're generally only going to have a view pieces of information available, like the artist name, species, sex/genitals, and perhaps some vague details. We can't and shouldn't expect or encourage people to search so precisely so as to be able to get only that one specific result they're after. After all, if you're searching for something you won't have all the details, and some of the details you do have could be wrong, so encouraging hyper-specific tag searches would be a hindrance to actually finding things, rather than using more vague details and trying different alternatives if it's not coming up in the results. The more specific you try to be, the harder it will be to work with.

thegreatwolfgang said:
As for mistagging, I don't understand how something as simple as <color>_body_part would get misused. It is simple to understand and the people who tag them would most likely be the only ones using them.

The people adding tags are the ones searching for them? That sounds quite backwards to me. Unless you mean the only use these tags have is to be added to posts, which means it's just extra tags for tagging's sake. As for how, well just look. monotone_eyes is being used on posts that have more than one color in their eyes. monotone_breasts is being used on posts that have more than one color on their breasts. People started tagging them without considering how they'd be interpreted, and didn't consider which ways they would be most useful, so now the usefulness they would've had for searching is gone and they're just tags to pad out the tag list.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Your assessment of monotone_eyes and monotone_breasts being misused is based off what definition? There is no wiki written for the both of them.
If we are following the conventional use of monotone_*, I would say that that would be the eyes and breasts that are monotone, whilst not considering the colour differences of the pupils/sclera or nipples/areola.

Based on common interpretation, and a basic assessment of how they'd be most useful. monotone_eyes would mean the whole eye is a single color, not just the pupils, just as monotone_fur would mean the whole fur is a single color, not just some arbitrary section of fur. Your interpretation of only considering the pupil is next to useless since the vast majority of eyes are single-color pupils distinct from the sclera (where even if you do search it, would include so many posts that it won't narrow the results down by any useful measure), and creates absurdities like post #3327670 being "monotone eyes" despite there being two distinct colors in the eyes. Consequently, on the occasion where someone needs/tries to search for true monotone eyes, like in post #3295801, their search will fail because it's flooded out with eyes that have multiple colors.

Similar for breasts. Nowhere does it say the the areola/nipples aren't part of the breasts. In fact, there is the featureless_breasts tag which indicates when the breasts are lacking the features of areola and nipples, meaning they are otherwise considered part of the breast when present (for X to be a feature of Y, X needs to be part of Y).

watsit said:
When is that necessary to examine a post in detail to make it useful for searching? If someone's searching for a post, they're generally only going to have a view pieces of information available, like the artist name, species, sex/genitals, and perhaps some vague details.

Again, useful for cropped artworks with the absence of all of these identifying information, especially in the case of cropped yiff artworks used for memes.
E.g., An extreme closeup on a character's face where the only things that are identifiable are the select few facial features would make these detailed tagging useful.

The people adding tags are the ones searching for them? That sounds quite backwards to me. Unless you mean the only use these tags have is to be added to posts, which means it's just extra tags for tagging's sake. As for how, well just look. monotone_eyes is being used on posts that have more than one color in their eyes. monotone_breasts is being used on posts that have more than one color on their breasts. People started tagging them without considering how they'd be interpreted, and didn't consider which ways they would be most useful, so now the usefulness they would've had for searching is gone and they're just tags to pad out the tag list.

I meant that as people who are experienced with tagging in that detail, or in order words, people who are actively using these tags would be the ones who would know about it.
No ordinary user will go above and beyond to tag minute details like nose colours or finger colours, most likely they would just settle with <color>_body and call it a day.

Based on common interpretation, and a basic assessment of how they'd be most useful. monotone_eyes would mean the whole eye is a single color, not just the pupils, just as monotone_fur would mean the whole fur is a single color, not just some arbitrary section of fur. Your interpretation of only considering the pupil is next to useless since the vast majority of eyes are single-color pupils distinct from the sclera (where even if you do search it, would include so many posts that it won't narrow the results down by any useful measure), and creates absurdities like post #3327670 being "monotone eyes" despite there being two distinct colors in the eyes. Consequently, on the occasion where someone needs/tries to search for true monotone eyes, like in post #3295801, their search will fail because it's flooded out with eyes that have multiple colors.

Similar for breasts. Nowhere does it say the the areola/nipples aren't part of the breasts. In fact, there is the featureless_breasts tag which indicates when the breasts are lacking the features of areola and nipples, meaning they are otherwise considered part of the breast when present (for X to be a feature of Y, X needs to be part of Y).

I disagree, for your definition of monotone_eyes, it should be renamed to avoid any confusion.
If you are looking for uniform colours throughout the sclera, eyes/iris, & pupils, I wouldn't call it monotone_eyes.
If you look in the eyes wiki, colours are sectioned off into three sections - eye/iris, sclera, and pupil. The eye is considered separate from the sclera and pupil.
E.g., Empty_eyes (only has iris, no pupil or sclera) is not the same as no_pupils (has iris & sclera, but no pupil) or no_sclera (has iris & pupil, but no sclera).

Same for breasts. If a character's body is entirely white in colour, having white_breasts but with pink_nipples, I would not call it two_tone_breasts.
Or with white_breasts + pink_areola + red_nipples, I would not call it multicolored_breasts.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Again, useful for cropped artworks with the absence of all of these identifying information, especially in the case of cropped yiff artworks used for memes.
E.g., An extreme closeup on a character's face where the only things that are identifiable are the select few facial features would make these detailed tagging useful.

I still challenge the usefulness of such tags, like monotone_eyebrows, teeth, red_mouth, your interpretation of monotone_eyes. If you're needing tags like that for a search, you may as well just forward to https://e621.net/posts. More over, with a little as these hyper-detailed tags are used compared to their slightly more vague cousins, the likelihood of such tags aiding in the discovery of the desired post is next to 0, while slightly more vague but more widely used tags would increase the chances of finding what they want. Again, we shouldn't expect, or even encourage, people to search with as highly detailed particulars as they can so they can land perfectly on the precise result they're looking for. Such a thing won't be possible.

thegreatwolfgang said:
I meant that as people who are experienced with tagging in that detail, or in order words, people who are actively using these tags would be the ones who would know about it.
No ordinary user will go above and beyond to tag minute details like nose colours or finger colours, most likely they would just settle with <color>_body and call it a day.

That comes across as rather pretentious and somewhat clique-ish. That just because you add a lot of hyper-specific tags to posts, whereas I just try to ensure good and correct tagging with somewhere around 30 to 50 or so tags per post, you get to decide which tags should go on posts and what the tags mean. I may not add 100+ tags to every post I upload, but when I see tags getting ruined because a lot of apparent fluff tags are hiding their misuse, I think it's pertinent to speak up about it.

thegreatwolfgang said:
I disagree, for your definition of monotone_eyes, it should be renamed to avoid any confusion.
If you are looking for uniform colours throughout the sclera, eyes/iris, & pupils, I wouldn't call it monotone_eyes.
If you look in the eyes wiki, colours are sectioned off into three sections - eye/iris, sclera, and pupil. The eye is considered separate from the sclera and pupil.

Colloquially, people refer to the iris color as the "eye color", because in normal general real-life usage, the eye has white sclera and a black iris, leaving the only "color" to the pupil. But the eye is composed of the sclera, pupil, and iris, and with art there are more options for different-colored sclera and irises. So just as the chest isn't the only part of the body, the pupil isn't the only part of the eye. Saying a character that has monotone_pupils should be tagged with monotone_eyes even when the sclera is a different color, is like saying a character that has monotone_fur covering their chest should be tagged monotone_body even when the scales covering their stomach/abdomen are a different color.

I strongly believe using monotone_eyes to refer to the eye as a whole (iris, pupil, and sclera, whichever happen to exist) all being one color is a perfectly reasonable interpretation and not hard to grasp when seeing it used that way (in fact, I had been trying to think of what to call/tag it when the eye as a whole was just one color, and when I happened to spot monotone_eyes on some post, it was a head-slap "duh" moment for me; until I saw the state the tag was in, which really set me off). Considering monotone_pupil is even less useful than white_sclera (which is aliased away due to being so common), having monotone_eyes effectively be an alias of monotone_pupil makes it painfully unnecessary to use that way, while people seeing it apply to images like post #3368532, post #3368307, and post #3327670 would come away less sure about what it actually means.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Same for breasts. If a character's body is entirely white in colour, having white_breasts but with pink_nipples, I would not call it two_tone_breasts.
Or with white_breasts + pink_areola + red_nipples, I would not call it multicolored_breasts.

I disagree. If I had a cropped picture of just some character's breasts, and it had red nipples and pink areola, with white covering the flesh/fur/scales around it, I would not expect to find it under monotone_breasts. I would not do such a search with monotone_breasts because it makes no sense to not consider all parts of the breast for whether it as a whole is monotone or multicolored.

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