Haha, you almost bought that, didn't you? Replace the last half of that last sentence with "just to try to be clever and Epic Fail at it most of the time".
Keywords hanging off your posts allow you to find individual posts amongst the mountains of them you may accumulate over time. On a blog though, you can search the entire thing for any text string you want so it's really not that important to go around sprinkling keywords on everything like you were throwing candy to the crowds at a parade. But while I am pretty loosey-goosey on keywording in my blog, I am dead serious about it on my photographs.
Keywords are a type of metadata, which just means "data about data". They are stored in the picture file itself* and I consider keywording to be vital and mandatory. BTW, some consumer-oriented programs call keywords "tags".
I need to be able to find specific shots in my library quickly, and that library has now grown to more than 100,000 photographs. I have recently been restructuring my Lightroom keyword hierarchy to make it more efficient and easier to apply to incoming photos. It can be a royal pain in the keister, but modern software like Lightroom really makes it tolerable.
Although I am disciplined about keywording, I really don't go overboard with it. Some photographers apply 50 or 100 keywords to every image they take, minimum, and to me that seems like overkill. I just want the basics. Here's an example:
This picture is tagged with the following keywords in my Lightroom Library:
USA, Michigan, Detroit, Mexicantown
Places, Restaurants, Mexican Restaurants, Lupita's Taquiera
Eight keywords, not too crazy. And since the keywords are hierarchical, all I need to apply to the image are "Mexican Town", and "Lupita's Taquiera", and all the other words are automatically added because they are parents.
But there are photogs out there who say that's not enough description, especially if you want to sell stock photographs online where customers know exactly what they want and do very specific searches. So one of these guys might tag this same picture with:
USA, Michigan, Detroit, Southwest Detroit, Mexicantown
Places, Restaurants, Mexican Restaurants, Lupita's Taquiera
Colors, Warm, Orange
Signs, Neon
Glass
Gasses
Wiring
Reflections
Electrical Appliances
Angled Shots
Isometric Shots
Outdoors
Sidewalks
Christmas Trees
Christmas Ornaments
Christmas Lights
And then, go into a thesaurus and look up the synonyms for every single word in that list and add them too. And then you might as well type in the entire menu of that restaurant, in case anyone who is out looking for an image of a frothy Horchata might like this even better. These photogs often have 15,000 or more keywords in their libraries! For them, "clouds" is not enough. They have to go to the next level. Check this out:
Clouds, Altocumulus
Clouds, Altostratus
Clouds, Cirrocumulus
Clouds, Cirrostratus
Clouds, Cirrus
Clouds, Contrail
Clouds, Cumulonimbus
Clouds, Cumulus
Clouds, Nacreous
Clouds, Nimbostratus
Clouds, Noctilucent
Clouds, Stratocumulus
Clouds, Stratus
That's an actual section of a stock photographer's keyword list. So now you need to be a climatologist in addition to a photographer, just to tag a freaking sky picture. Does this guy really know the difference between Nimbostratus and Cirrostratus clouds? God I hope not.
I imagine keyword frenzy like that may be cool to do if you happen not to have any friends or family, but for the social photographer, it's just way, way too harsh.
So I keyword responsibly, not too much, not too crazy, just right, like Goldilocks.
Which is not one of my keywords.
* Your camera automatically packs your picture files full of useful metadata like the time and date the picture was taken, the camera model and serial number, lens information, exposure information, flash firing state, and lots of other goodies. So it's not necessary to keyword things like that - they're already in there.
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