so, about that fanart index thing...

[ratcreature]

I've spent a couple of hours tagging fanart for the LJ fanart link sharing group brown_betty helpfully created at simpy.com. This method has the advantage over LJ memories that you can tag with more than five labels, also the tags of the group are searchable, and you can rather easily merge and edit them (something that turned out useful when you notice you tagged half the "Tim/Bart" "Bart/Tim"...). The only thing that bugs me is that with group tags is that there doesn't seem to be an option to just list all used tags, it just shows the most common.

Anyway, besides the fandom (mainly DC art so far) I tried to tag like the dcfic_index for characters, pairings, gen, slash, het, and femslash, sometimes team names in ensemble pictures, and in addition to that included tags like elseworld, and crossover, as well as "animated" if one or more characters were the toon versions. Also if the picture was labeled NWS or clearly showed a sex scene or character pin-up with nudity I tagged it NWS as well. So far there's 280 links, which should be enough for you to check out whether you find this system useful for searching for fanart:
http://www.simpy.com/group/161

Thoughts, opinions anyone?

Comments

[thete1.livejournal.com]

Oh you so completely and totally win. Just... *win*. I feel like I ought to offer some sort of useful suggestion, but I just keep finding fanart I missed and... yes. Thank you!

[ratcreature]

Heh. My tagging was frequently interrupted by staring at gorgeous fanart too. *g*

But I'm glad you find this system useful. I find it just so frustrating that often I can't find fanart I briefly glanced at again a bit later to look at it some more or offer feedback. I guess, what I'd really like would be a centralized searchable archive for fanart where everybody just puts their stuff, and it wouldn't be any work for me, but since that's not likely to be happening (and I'm not about to be declared ruler of fandom any time soon, so that I could just decree this *snerk*) I'll settle for such a searchable link list, that hopefully will grow into to index a significant portion.

Also as I understand it from what brown_betty explained to me it'll be easy to invite more people to tag for the group, so that the work can be split between people following different communities and fandoms and such eventually (provided that enough people find this tagging format suitable for such a resource). Which I think is really important if such a collection is supposed to grow and stay current.

[brownbetty]

Maybe you could post at some fanart comms asking if people are interested in getting an account? I don't belong to any because.... I can't draw.

[ratcreature]

Good idea, I'm only a member of comics_fanart, but I could certainly post there, and ask if anyone is interested to help with the tagging, and I'm sure some members belong also to other fanart communities.