Currently, they have the following problems:
#1. Several color related tags are aliased when they should not be. Cyan_*, for example, is aliased to Blue_*, Dark_Grey_* is aliased to Grey_*.
This is a recurring problem because it makes tagging and searching certain images by color harder. For example, every one of these posts are tagged "blue_body":
post #3891546 post #3842191 post #3851616 post #3887112 post #3801333 post #3891144 post #3892325 post #3892423 post #3842205 post #3733729 post #3719288 post #3791362
Aliasng Cyan_* to Blue_* is as bad as aliasing Orange_* to Red_*.
#2. We need to encourage people to use these tags properly. Magenta_* exists, but most often the posts are tagged Pink_* instead. For example, Magenta_body has only 360 posts, meanwhile Pink_body has 88k posts.
Like examples above, all these posts are currently tagged "pink_body", I am most decidedly gonna fix this after posting this post:
post #3890460 post #3886720 post #3888839 post #3888561 post #3886522 post #3886114 post #3887264

First off, it is important that we set a baseline.

I will use this diagram as a baseline.
https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/learn_tutorials/6/5/0/RGB_ColorMix.jpg

All the primary colors should be their own tag: Red, Green and Blue.
All the secondary colors should have their own tag: Yellow, Cyan and Magenta.
All the in-between colors, or tertiary colors, should be optional, maybe these can safely be aliased on a case-by-case basis: Orange, Chartreuse (It means yellow-green), Teal (or turquoise), Azure (Sometimes called sky blue), Purple (or violet) and Pink.
Any other color should always be aliased no matter what.

Now, about the shades, I think all the colors and most particularly the grays should have a dark_* and light_* variant. Let's say a character has dark fur, but really dark fur. In the current circumstances, do I use grey_fur or black_fur? Sometimes, I would spend an entire minute on this all because of some very dark gray fur. I really don't understand why dark_grey_* is not its own tag. Brown is a darker tone of the color orange and yet it is its own tag, it is not impicated to orange_* either.

A recent example that bothered me during upload was this post #3886244

This goes without saying that issue applies to all colors, there are several posts where the character has Lavender fur (light purple), i have posted several examples way above, but then again, they have been tagged pink_body instead of light_purple_body or lavender_body.

The main issue with the color tags is that they have become very debatable among many users. Not everyone sees a certain color the same way. Primary and secondary colors like red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple are undeniably the same for every (non-colorblind) person, but once we get to the tertiary colors, as well as the very specific color shades (such as cyan, teal, violet, azure, lilac, vermilion, prussian, maroon, etc.), that’s where things go very bad.

For tagging purposes, e621 tends to use the most basic terms for the colors to keep things simple and less complicated for users (ironically 🫤)

That being said, cyan can be regarded as a very ‘neon’ shade of blue (though some see it as a shade of green for some reason? 🤷‍♂️). So for simplicity, we just alias it to blue. The same can be said for other color shades:

• Magenta is a shade of pink
• Violet is a shade of purple
• Azure is a shade of blue

Teal (borderline green-blue) still remains as its own tag, though admin is still deciding on what to do with it along with all other color tags.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind using the specific color names, but it would be very complicated for people who aren’t familiar with them.

As someone who uses the color tags a lot when editing posts, I do notice some frustrations when a color can be perceived in more ways than one (like pink-purple, blue-purple, and green-blue).

I think e621 needs to come up with an official color chart/wheel so that tagging posts can be made easier, but simple terms are still used as much as possible. Some sort of reform needs to happen for sure!

Very much related discussion: https://e621.net/forum_topics/33746
Also it apparently lost a recent admin vote: https://e621.net/forum_topics/34551

Cyan being aliased to blue makes sense to me tbh, simply because it definitely looks like a mass misstagging issue waiting to happen.

Funnily enough when I start typing in magenta the first thing I see is magenta eyes -> purple eyes. Just looking at magenta_* and then comparing the results to purple_* and pink_* I can honestly see why the magenta tags are rarely used.

shitposter said:
Funnily enough when I start typing in magenta the first thing I see is magenta eyes -> purple eyes. Just looking at magenta_* and then comparing the results to purple_* and pink_* I can honestly see why the magenta tags are rarely used.

This is exactly what I mean. I see magenta as a pink and yet some people see it as a purple (I’ll admit it does comes off as a purple sometimes).

If any admin is reading this thread, it would be very helpful if e621 provided some color chart that basically says “this shade should be tagged as ???”. This would make things much easier for us.

zenith-pendragon said:
That being said, cyan can be regarded as a very ‘neon’ shade of blue (though some see it as a shade of green for some reason? 🤷‍♂️). So for simplicity, we just alias it to blue. The same can be said for other color shades:

• Magenta is a shade of pink
• Violet is a shade of purple
• Azure is a shade of blue

That is just false, cyan is a different color from Indigo (The real scientific name for "blue"), you get it by mixing blue with green. Go to any art software, set the rgb channel to 0;255;255 and then you'll get cyan. For blue or indigo, you use 0;0;255 instead.

Teal (borderline green-blue) still remains as its own tag, though admin is still deciding on what to do with it along with all other color tags.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind using the specific color names, but it would be very complicated for people who aren’t familiar with them.

That is why I made an exception in my complaint, for colors that simply don't need to be there. Crimson is very closely related to red, so it is safe to assume it to be red. At any rate, there are 256³ unique colors that can saved by a computer and possibly more that can be displayed by a monitor, and all of them were given a name. Have you ever heard of the color "absolute zero"? I am not arguing in favor of liberal usage of every color ever known, but of a more robust tagging.

So, all in all, this is why I think it would be best to have a somewhat more robust system than what is available right now because of the fact that there are 2 colors that clearly don't look the same displayed together under blue_* whicb can be problematic. As for the misstagging, it is not completely preventable, but I would like that some thoughts get put into it. Some of these tags have no wiki to speak of.

(And personally speaking, I think teal should be aliased to cyan, once cyan is its own tag first.)

As someone who uses the color tags a lot when editing posts, I do notice some frustrations when a color can be perceived in more ways than one (like pink-purple, blue-purple, and green-blue).

I think e621 needs to come up with an official color chart/wheel so that tagging posts can be made easier, but simple terms are still used as much as possible. Some sort of reform needs to happen for sure!

I agree.

zenith-pendragon said:
This is exactly what I mean. I see magenta as a pink and yet some people see it as a purple (I’ll admit it does comes off as a purple sometimes).

If any admin is reading this thread, it would be very helpful if e621 provided some color chart that basically says “this shade should be tagged as ???”. This would make things much easier for us.

I would love that since it is sometimes hard for me to tell whether a color is orange or red, especially on the Pokemon Braixen and it would be generally more of a positive to avoid poor tagging.

I remember when someone tried to make burlywood_body a tag.

zenith-pendragon said:
This is exactly what I mean. I see magenta as a pink and yet some people see it as a purple (I’ll admit it does comes off as a purple sometimes).

If any admin is reading this thread, it would be very helpful if e621 provided some color chart that basically says “this shade should be tagged as ???”. This would make things much easier for us.

This is an ambient lighting controversy waiting to happen. Did we learn nothing from that godsdamned dress? The colour tags are kept as simple as possible for a reason.

I personally suspect the only reason the "magenta" tags exist is because no admin has noticed them yet.

wat8548 said:
I remember when someone tried to make burlywood_body a tag.

This is an ambient lighting controversy waiting to happen. Did we learn nothing from that godsdamned dress? The colour tags are kept as simple as possible for a reason.

I personally suspect the only reason the "magenta" tags exist is because no admin has noticed them yet.

I have never heard of "burlywood" before, this is one of those colors like the "absolute zero" I mentioned earlier.

Keeping tags simple should not come at the cost of making it harder to tag at all. This is frustrating to have to decide between grey_fur and black_fur every 16th post.

Go ask an admin to nuke burlywood_body, this is a different problem entirely.

wolfmanfur said:
That is just false, cyan is a different color from Indigo (The real scientific name for "blue"), you get it by mixing blue with green. Go to any art software, set the rgb channel to 0;255;255 and then you'll get cyan. For blue or indigo, you use 0;0;255 instead.

I’m very aware that cyan is a combination of green and blue light in technical terms, but visually it’s a light (neon) blue.

Indigo is one of those frustrating borderline colors I just mentioned. It’s either blue or purple or in between.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another issue should be pointed out here, especially with regards to digital art:
Every computer/smartphone screen has a different color gamut, meaning that a color will display as light blue on one screen and as green on another screen. This may be a reason why there is so much debate with regards to the color tags, since people are literally seeing the colors differently on their screen(s).
Hell, I see a blue color on my own monitor and them the exact same color as purple on another monitor.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

wolfmanfur said:
That is why I made an exception in my complaint, for colors that simply don't need to be there. Crimson is very closely related to red, so it is safe to assume it to be red. At any rate, there are 256³ unique colors that can saved by a computer and possibly more that can be displayed by a monitor, and all of them were given a name. Have you ever heard of the color "absolute zero"? I am not arguing in favor of liberal usage of every color ever known, but of a more robust tagging.

So, all in all, this is why I think it would be best to have a somewhat more robust system than what is available right now because of the fact that there are 2 colors that clearly don't look the same displayed together under blue_* whicb can be problematic. As for the misstagging, it is not completely preventable, but I would like that some thoughts get put into it. Some of these tags have no wiki to speak of.

(And personally speaking, I think teal should be aliased to cyan, once cyan is its own tag first.)

I’m in for a more robust color system, but we need to make sure that things don’t get too complicated. I guess we’ll have to discuss this further as time goes by.

wat8548 said:
This is an ambient lighting controversy waiting to happen. Did we learn nothing from that godsdamned dress?

An interesting point you brought up. The background/environment/lighting can have a huge impact on how a color can be perceived. The Dress is the perfect example of this.

If an e621 color chart will happen, perhaps it should also come with a few examples on how colors may appear under different lighting conditions (daytime, nighttime, artificial lighting, etc.).

Technically, those might be cyan, but psychologically, a viewer is going to call them blue. Because they look in the range of what we associate as being blue, they're considered blue rather than green-blue. Remember the old mnemonic for remembering the colors of the rainbow, ROY G. BIV? Yes, that calls cyan "Blue". You can hate it all you want as someone trained in color theory, but exceedingly few here, including artists, are trained in that. We work with what we've got to work with.

Comparing cyan to orange is good because, once, orange was conflated with red or divided into reddish orange versus yellowish orange. One could say that cyan is now where orange was 500 years ago. On top of that, several languages nowadays don't separate blue and green (and thus also cyan) into separate colors.

Although teal is essentially cyan, it's generally psychologically perceived as more greenish than blue, so it generally often is shoved towards green for simplicity's sake. However, there has been some thought in using teal in place of cyan as a tag name because it's more recognizably between green and blue.

clawstripe said:
Technically, those might be cyan, but psychologically, a viewer is going to call them blue. Because they look in the range of what we associate as being blue, they're considered blue rather than green-blue. Remember the old mnemonic for remembering the colors of the rainbow, ROY G. BIV? Yes, that calls cyan "Blue". You can hate it all you want as someone trained in color theory, but exceedingly few here, including artists, are trained in that. We work with what we've got to work with.

And the "actual" blue is indigo in that acronym. Overall, it's just not a very good mnemonic if you ask me, because "indigo" isn't a color word that actually sees typical use.

Even so, though, even it recognizes cyan and "indigo" as separate enough to give different mentions instead of covering it all with just one big blue.

lendrimujina said:
Even so, though, even it recognizes cyan and "indigo" as separate enough to give different mentions instead of covering it all with just one big blue.

And my point is that it illustrates that we psychologically perceive cyan as a blue, regardless.

zenith-pendragon said:
The main issue with the color tags is that they have become very debatable among many users. Not everyone sees a certain color the same way. Primary and secondary colors like red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple are undeniably the same for every (non-colorblind) person, but once we get to the tertiary colors, as well as the very specific color shades (such as cyan, teal, violet, azure, lilac, vermilion, prussian, maroon, etc.), that’s where things go very bad.

Sorry to split hairs, but orange and purple are neither primary nor secondary colors; they’re actually tertiary colors. Orange is the combination of red (primary) and yellow (secondary), and purple is the combination of blue (primary) and magenta (secondary). They’re just very _popular_ colors, despite being tertiary.

Similarly, cyan is a secondary color, not a tertiary color nor a specific shade of another color. It’s just not a very widely known color, that’s all. This is probably the reason that cyan keeps popping up in the forums - because it actually is a real secondary color.

For tagging purposes, e621 tends to use the most basic terms for the colors to keep things simple and less complicated for users (ironically 🫤)

That being said, cyan can be regarded as a very ‘neon’ shade of blue (though some see it as a shade of green for some reason? 🤷‍♂️). So for simplicity, we just alias it to blue. The same can be said for other color shades:

• Magenta is a shade of pink
• Violet is a shade of purple
• Azure is a shade of blue

Teal (borderline green-blue) still remains as its own tag, though admin is still deciding on what to do with it along with all other color tags.

The staff team have discussed teal and decided pretty strongly in favor of keeping it, so it most likely isn’t going anywhere.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind using the specific color names, but it would be very complicated for people who aren’t familiar with them.

As someone who uses the color tags a lot when editing posts, I do notice some frustrations when a color can be perceived in more ways than one (like pink-purple, blue-purple, and green-blue).

I think e621 needs to come up with an official color chart/wheel so that tagging posts can be made easier, but simple terms are still used as much as possible. Some sort of reform needs to happen for sure!

I do like the idea of an official color chart. We have also been discussing the idea of keeping more specific color tags. That’s still a work in progress, though, and we haven’t come to any concrete decisions there yet.

wolfmanfur said:
(stuff)

I think the reason that we decided against cyan was simply because most people don’t know what it is. As Clawstripe pointed out, the uninformed user simply thinks it’s a type of blue. It’s technically not blue, sure, but most people think it is. That’s the problem. We have, however, decided on keeping teal. Despite the fact that teal is literally just dark cyan, most people seem to be able to recognize it. It was an extremely popular color back in the 80’s and 90’s, so it seems to have ingrained itself in the collective consciousness in a way that cyan never did. For that reason, it’s far less prone to mistagging than cyan. I think we’ll end up aliasing cyan to teal, as it’s much more accurate than calling it blue.

As for the dark and light colors, the current solution is to tag (color)_fur and dark_fur together, indicating dark_(color)_fur. It’s not perfect, sure, but creating light and dark variants of every color we have will add a lot of new tags.

We might reconsider this in the future - the idea of color implication hierarchies has been thrown around, though it would be a lot of work. But something like lavender could imply purple, or dark red could imply red. This is still just an idea at this stage, though, so don’t get your hopes up.

scaliespe said:
Sorry to split hairs, but orange and purple are neither primary nor secondary colors; they’re actually tertiary colors. Orange is the combination of red (primary) and yellow (secondary), and purple is the combination of blue (primary) and magenta (secondary). They’re just very _popular_ colors, despite being tertiary.

Similarly, cyan is a secondary color, not a tertiary color nor a specific shade of another color. It’s just not a very widely known color, that’s all. This is probably the reason that cyan keeps popping up in the forums - because it actually is a real secondary color.

I should’ve clarified that I was refering to the colors of ink/pigment rather than the colors of light. My bad 😅

My country (or at least my former school) uses this color wheel to describe primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Red, yellow, and blue are viewed as primary. However, I found out that this isn’t quite accurate. 🤦‍♂️

Let’s have a look at these two (accurate) diagrams . What we see is that depending on what color system we use, the primary colors and secondary colors will change. Light uses red, green, and blue (RGB) as it’s primary colors and pigment uses cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY(K)) as it’s primary colors. Another notable difference is that some colors look very different on both diagrams. For example, cyan and magenta are far brighter (more neon) in RGB than in CMYK. (This could also be a reason why there is so much debate on cyan)

scaliespe said:
The staff team have discussed teal and decided pretty strongly in favor of keeping it, so it most likely isn’t going anywhere.

Thankfully so

scaliespe said:
I do like the idea of an official color chart. We have also been discussing the idea of keeping more specific color tags. That’s still a work in progress, though, and we haven’t come to any concrete decisions there yet.

If it’s any helpful, I’d like to make a suggestion:
E621 has a collection of posts that help users tag posts accurately (see tagging_guidelines_illustrated).
What if a willing artist could draw/paint a chart with various shades/hues that can help users use the right color tags. Of course admin/staff will have to discuss first which color names will be ‘approved’ (those that will have a tag) and then reach out to someone who will make the chart. In the end, this chart must be on every color related wiki.

scaliespe said:
As for the dark and light colors, the current solution is to tag (color)_fur and dark_fur together, indicating dark_(color)_fur. It’s not perfect, sure, but creating light and dark variants of every color we have will add a lot of new tags.

I feel like this system should stay as is. Color + light/dark seems like a useful combo already. No need to make so many new tags.

scaliespe said:
Sorry to split hairs, but orange and purple are neither primary nor secondary colors; they’re actually tertiary colors. Orange is the combination of red (primary) and yellow (secondary), and purple is the combination of blue (primary) and magenta (secondary). They’re just very _popular_ colors, despite being tertiary.

Similarly, cyan is a secondary color, not a tertiary color nor a specific shade of another color. It’s just not a very widely known color, that’s all. This is probably the reason that cyan keeps popping up in the forums - because it actually is a real secondary color.

important to note: there are multiple color systems and whether a color is primary/secondary tertiary depends on which one you're going by.

scaliespe said:
The staff team have discussed teal and decided pretty strongly in favor of keeping it, so it most likely isn’t going anywhere.

We might reconsider this in the future - the idea of color implication hierarchies has been thrown around, though it would be a lot of work. But something like lavender could imply purple, or dark red could imply red. This is still just an idea at this stage, though, so don’t get your hopes up.

I wish you were right, but teal_fur was aliased to green_fur which adds more irony to this faulty system.

post #3796361

Yeah guys look she has definitely got an authentic green grass colored body!

I would fix this myself, but I would have to remove green_fur entirely and change green_body to teal_body which could be seen as vandalism as I'm removing tags without replacing them. Maybe that could pass given the characters look like they're made of plastic or clay.

There are a few more examples from your rejected bur showing teal_* being aliased to green_*. https://e621.net/forum_topics/34551
In itself, this begets the question why this was not approved despite all the positive votes, and no I won't accept "the admins said no" as an excuse.

wolfmanfur said:
Yeah guys look she has definitely got an authentic green grass colored body!

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I'd definitely call that (a shade of) green, and I would consider it a problem if searching green_fur/green_body didn't result in that.

That's ultimately the problem I see. People want to tag cyan or teal on things to be extra-specific about the color, yet someone will come along and remember they were looking for something that looked bright blue or dark green, and wouldn't find it, reducing searchability rather than improving it. It's telling that you can have a perfect mix of blue and green to get cyan, which people perceive as blue, but simply dim the color (keeping them equal mix) and suddenly people perceive it as green.

Just throwing a random idea: Add a color picker in the post edit/upload page, and depending on the color value, the tool automatically picks the appropriate tag for that color, based on a pre-determinated chart that could be created for this purpose.

watsit said:
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I'd definitely call that (a shade of) green, and I would consider it a problem if searching green_fur/green_body didn't result in that.

With that kind of logic, I could make the argument that orange should be aliased to red. You get cyan in the same way you get orange, you mix an equal amount of 2 colors together. Yet, orange is its own tag, and cyan is aliased. Cyan is a secondary color whereas orange is tertiary on top of that.

And aside from that, the rationale to keep cyan aliased to blue is obtuse. I am sure orange_fur gets a massive amount of mistagging as well considering the weird colors people use on their characters. Take Braixen for example. Her ear fluff will sometimes be a reddish orange, I normally just give her red_fur for this, but I can see that she gets orange_fur as well.
https://e621.net/posts?tags=braixen+orange_fur
https://e621.net/posts?tags=braixen+red_fur

Personally,I would not want that, but this is to illustrate why I said that aliasing cyan_* to blue_* is equally as bad as the hypothetical of aliasing orange_* to red_*. I have proposed my own feature to fight this, tag suggestions, set by the admins, so whenever anybody publishes a picture of Pikachu they are prompted to use yellow_fur, red_cheecks, black_markings, etc instead of having to fill it manually, and unlike implications, if the Pikachu is shiny the uploader can remove the suggested tags and add the correct tags that would go for the Pokemon when it's shiny. This is already possible via a script, so I believe it is a doable sitewide feature.
It would also reduce the occurence of images being tagfed incorrectly, generally speaking.

That's ultimately the problem I see. People want to tag cyan or teal on things to be extra-specific about the color, yet someone will come along and remember they were looking for something that looked bright blue or dark green, and wouldn't find it, reducing searchability rather than improving it. It's telling that you can have a perfect mix of blue and green to get cyan, which people perceive as blue, but simply dim the color (keeping them equal mix) and suddenly people perceive it as green.

In that case, cyan_* as well as indigo_* should implicate blue_*. Somebody else mentioned that earlier. So, each color are clearly separated, but they are still searchable regardless.

However, people can be directly told to search for cyan and they then would have an increased likelihood of finding what they were looking for than if they were searching for blue as it's too general of a tag to be of any help. Look at how many posts are tagged blue_body, 242k, it is double the amount of posts under red_body and almost triple the amount for green_body. The only body tags with more posts than blue_body are brown_body, since animals tend to have brown fur, and white_body, another color common in animals.

Moreover, the current system does hurt searchability, see my opening post, look at how much the images differ in color from each other, that fact alone hurts your argumnt.
Let's say I want to search for this: post #3887112 because I remember seeing it, but can't remember what was exactly in there nor figure out what tags to put in the search field, so I would type cyan_body, but it gets turned into blue_body automatically, so whatever I tell myself and then I cannot find the post because a whole lot of pictures of furs with a strong purplish blue color tone are showing up in my search.
This post in particular is most certainly not a good example because it is recent, it likely appears on page 1 or 2, but what if the post was much older. For example, it could be from 2010.

The usual advice is if a colour could be seen as two colours, just tag both. Not to mention when you start adding in coloured lighting colours can be percieved differently to what their RGB values would be.

From earlier examples:
post #3890460
I definitely see that as purple with pink/magenta highlights. So would likely tag purple/pink body.

post #3886720
That's tagged as purple, though I'd say the clothes are purple and the body is pink.

post #3888561
I'd usually tag as blue/pink/purple, then it'd be fine for others to add magenta/lavendar as well if that's what they saw.

The first ones I'd usually tag as blue, given light_blue is aliased to blue_body. I never really think to search for cyan_x.

For me it's not really about "what's the most correct colour" and "what will people search for when looking for this post."

wolfmanfur said:
With that kind of logic, I could make the argument that orange should be aliased to red.

People have expressed issues with tagging orange/red/brown/tan before, that orange can easily be confused for red or brown in various circumstances, and brown can easily be confused with tan (which is itself sometimes easily confused for white). I've seen plainly grey things tagged as black. Colors are hard to get right because they depend heavily on perception (to say nothing of miscalibrated monitors, or peoples' colorful rooms, messing with the appearance of colors). Case in point, brown is orange, only differentiated by the brightness of the surrounding colors (which would also present a problem with a color picker, since the perceived color of a thing depends on the colors in the rest of the image). Let's not forget The Dress, showing that people can be confused between such a stark difference as white+gold and blue+black (and actually, the dress looks blue+brown to me).

The problem isn't that there's a problem, it's the severity of the problem that kept needing constant cleanup.

wolfmanfur said:
And aside from that, the rationale to keep cyan aliased to blue is obtuse. I am sure orange_fur gets a massive amount of mistagging as well considering the weird colors people use on their characters.

I don't doubt there are occasional mistags with orange, but the problems with cyan aren't hypothetical. The admins had been dealing with many issues over it which is what caused it to get aliased away in the first place. Aliasing it to blue was the least bad option, resulting in fewer mistags than aliasing it to green, and not splitting the same color over multiple tags. Orange hasn't shown itself to be as bad with mistags to warrant aliasing away.

wolfmanfur said:
I have proposed my own feature to fight this, tag suggestions, set by the admins, so whenever anybody publishes a picture of Pikachu they are prompted to use yellow_fur, red_cheecks, black_markings, etc instead of having to fill it manually, and unlike implications, if the Pikachu is shiny the uploader can remove the suggested tags and add the correct tags that would go for the Pokemon when it's shiny. This is already possible via a script, so I believe it is a doable sitewide feature.
It would also reduce the occurence of images being tagfed incorrectly, generally speaking.

I'm not sure. I feel too many people would just include the suggested tags as an easy way to increase the tag count, not bothering to remove what doesn't apply to the given image, resulting in mistags for things a given image doesn't have. We know people get lazy like that, with image sequences or a series of alts often having copy-pasted tags, including tags that don't apply to all images. Making it easier for people to apply potentially inapplicable tags will increase the number of posts tagged incorrectly, IMO.

wolfmanfur said:
In that case, cyan_* as well as indigo_* should implicate blue_*. Somebody else mentioned that earlier. So, each color are clearly separated, but they are still searchable regardless.

What would that do for the greener shades of cyan that aren't "blue"? An implication would force blue on posts that are a greener shade, making it impossible to remove a mistag without removing a valid tag (the current alias allows removing the mistag without removing a valid tag).

wolfmanfur said:
Moreover, the current system does hurt searchability, see my opening post, look at how much the images differ in color from each other, that fact alone hurts your argumnt.

Better to include a few more posts than a few less posts in the results. The way it is now, there is a higher chance of the desired post being within the results, than if they were separate and someone searched for one color but it was tagged with the other. If people can't keep blue/cyan straight for tagging, people would have to search for both colors when looking for either color, wading through the same results regardless. That would hurt searchability more than the current way.