In the digital world everyone loves to work for free. Particularly when it is an opportunity to help someone else earn money as a result of their efforts. With that in mind
Magnum Photos is looking for
volunteers to help them tag their online archive. If you’re interested sign up
here.
Magnum has loaded over 500,000 image files into its online database. But, 200,000 of them have little or no information attached, making them hard to find and difficult to utilize.
The answer for Magnum is crowdsourcing. They believe there will be lots of people who will want to help “some of the most amazing photographers in the world” in exchange for that “warm, fuzzy feeling of helping out an excellent organization — plus the ability to see these photos before just about anyone else.” The promotional material also says the volunteers will be able to “share (the images they work on) over social networks.”
The Magnum Tagger project is being launched in conjunction with
Tagasauris, and will start with a beta of just 50 volunteers, who are notified over Facebook or Twitter when there are new images to review. The volunteers will be able to annotate and tag the photos, with tags being linked to broader networks of information on the person, place or topic.
To combat the inherent problem of quality and crowdsourcing, all images will go through multiple volunteers before the annotations are accepted.
If this works I’m sure there will be a lot of other photography organization anxious to use the Tagasauris keywording tool. Tagasuris' clients and partners already include the Museum of the City of New York and Amazon Webservices.