Hi, I was wondering what people's thoughts are about various ambiguous tagging scenarios where tags end up getting tagged by different artists with different ideas of how the tags apply and are extended, etc.
One question that came to my mind was how much an artist's logo should play a role in the tags of an image. If an artist has a character in their logo, should that get fully tagged out with species etc.? Should the artist's signature count as "text" for the various text tags? If an artist for instance has a black wolf silhouette as a part of their monotone black logo, should it be tagged as having black_fur and a black_body, or is their reasonable doubt as to whether it's just an indescript silhouette?
Another issue that came up was regarding the tones of body parts/areas of the body and what applied to the tone, and I do think there's a lot of room to argue a wide range of what should or shouldn't count regarding tone. With the _fur, _scales, _feathers, _skin tags, it is pretty clear that tags are based on the body of the creature and their canonical (at least to the image itself) colorings minus anything that may be over top, but that could be disagreed upon as well and could even be ambiguous in some cases - maybe a character has markings that happen to look "like" make-up or they have a scar in an art-style where it looks like a simple stripe marking in the image. In these instances I think it might be fair to break away from the "Tag What You See" rule a bit using additional information for context since not doing so will result in varied interpretations and make such tagging potentially impractical or ineffective, or even detrimental. I would also argue that "face" and "head" are too similar to be tagged distinctly as the head encompasses the face anyway in a non-distinct way. The eyes are a part of the face, for instance, but we would never think to include them as part of the face colouring rather than their own thing within. In general, as well, I would think being more restrictive in what constitutes tone would be best otherwise we'd easily get into territory where the vast majority of things are multi-colored. Heads would almost always be multicolored if hair, make-up, lips, scars, noses, etc. were to be included and the multicolored tags would be comparable to the monotone tags at this point.
There are however instances where I think tone needs to be clearly defined and also can't be whittled down by tag aliases, namely with eyes. I've been struggling to work out eye tonality and what it means and how it should be tagged, and I think I can propose a decent idea. I think _iris tags should be unaliased to _eyes, for a start, as it will play into the rest of what I'm proposing. Each element of the eye should be taken into consideration, even the pupil, so monotone_eyes should only cover a limited range of eye types such as "dot_eyes" or monotone_eyes, or rare instances in which each element of the eye (sclera/iris/pupil) is the same tone, two_tone_eyes would typically cover certain animal eyes in which the iris is so big you rarely if ever see the sclera or toony eyes which intentionally exclude an element of the eye for style, and multicolored eyes would probably be the most common for anatomically correct humanoid eyes.
As for when a part of the eye anatomy is excluded I think it would be important to devise a system of guidelines for tagging:
-pupils tend to be relatively small and uniform in character and tone
-irises can vary widely in size and detail
-sclera tend to be white, can vary in detail (can have details to give a "bloodshot" or angry look), can be absent if iris encompasses all we can see.
I propose unaliasing the iris to eye tags, and then aliasing away the following
Pupils: dark_pupils black_pupils, monotone_pupils
Irises: monotone_iris
Sclera: light_sclera, monotone_sclera
pupils_only should, imo, only work for maybe cartoony images or dot_eyes where the eyes are represented by black dots etc. for comedic effect or the stuff of the like. If there is a sclera and pupils, it should just be tagged as no_irises. If however these sorts of empty eyes are detailed with elements of a realistic iris (those weird bands, squiggly lighting in the middle and squiggly dark shading on the edges, dark gradient edges etc.) without any pupils, I think a tag for irises_only could be used. sclerae_only could be useful for say comically empty eyes where the components of the eye have left due to shock or dread or what-have-you, and empty_eyes could encompass any eye that lacks two separate distinguishable components from one another.
eye_tattoo is currently being used incorrectly in the majority of cases. Irl, an eye tattoo is artificial colouring of the sclera by injection of ink. As a result, I don't even think eye_tattoo can work as a tag here at all - I'd have to stretch more than a fox on a Saturday night to find a use case for it in which coloured sclera tags wouldn't already do 99.99% of the work that that tag could do. Maybe in art you could have eye tattoos that don't colour the entire sclera, but I have yet to see this in my perusing of the internet.
I know this all sounds like stupid autistic pedantics, but it's already borked as it stands. Eyes get tagged all sorts of inconsistent ways in large amounts to where the only consistent thing is the lack of consistency itself. The elements I have addressed here are commonly inconsistent and as a result the tags are currently pretty useless for the moment.
I wouldn't suggest going as far to imply monotone_eyes for empty eyes since you could technically make gradient empty eyes or stuff of the like - you could have multiple tones without any discernible eye components.
I would also suggest singular-ifying each plural body part tag and tagging sides individually. I would think that two_tone_eyes would be more useful for finding an eye that has two colors rather than two monotone eyes that are distinct from one another, and I think blind_eye should be excluded from heterochromia (plus it's often very easy to determine a blind eye in art from just being a heterochromatic white eye via context clues - eye scar, white pupils, etc.)
This is a big stretch for sure, but I was also thinking looking_at_viewer should imply offscreen_character. It's considered a fourth wall break addressing the viewer, but I think there are at least a considerable portion of cases in which it's a POV scene from the perspective of an off-screen character. It is especially more clear if the character is interacting with or about to interact with the viewer. In addition, I'd like to say that offscreen characters should be entirely offscreen (some posts list mostly_offscreen_characters as offscreen) and that they should not be included in the scene's count - one on-screen character should be tagged as solo, not duo with solo_focus.
There are maybe hundreds of tags that should be reworked and I'm sure there are many obvious ones I've neglected to mention.