Tagging Posts on Twitter and Instagram

In pursuit of better image metadata I always try to tag my Twitter and Instagram posts with relevant parties, e.g., airline and airport accounts. For example, a picture I tweeted a few days ago, shown below, I tagged with the Twitter accounts of PSA Airlines, American Airlines and Manchester-Boston Airport.

I do this to “link” the photograph to relevant entities on the Web. Someone looking at the picture might now have their questions answered better (“What is PSA Airlines?”, for example, in the case of this image).

More about photo captioning…

A few days ago I wrote about what I would like to see in photo captions I find on the Web. Among other things, a caption should include the date on which the photo was taken. So, can you tell what this date is: 12/3/10? Americans would say that is December 3rd, 2010. Most Europeans would probably say March 12th, 2010 although I have seen people write like this and mean either March 10th, 2012 or October 3rd, 2012. Not helpful, is it…?

Labeling Aircraft Photographs

There are a lot of really nice photographs of aircraft one can find on the Internet. Not only do people create galleries of photographs, but you can find pictures by “following” individuals on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, or by joining specific Facebook groups.

What irritates me – and I am saying this because I tend to look at photographs as a form of historical record – is the lack of information about what all these photographs depict. I started So Many Aircraft as a means of providing and distributing reference information about aircraft, based on my own interest on building scale models. Collecting reference material for a model project often involves attempts to understand where and when a particular aircraft was used, and correlating multiple photographs found from different sources (as a model of an aircraft is like a snapshot of history). Against this, finding a (nice) photograph of, say, a Boeing 737 labeled “737 taking off from runway 17” is frustrating: Exactly what variant of 737 is this (I can see that it is a 737, but is it a -300, -7H4, or what?), what specific aircraft is this (what is its tail number and/or construction number?), where was this picture taken (runway 17 where?) and when?