Categories vs. Tags

[digimom]

Would anyone that uses both categories and tags tell me how you use them? I've been using only categories and no tags at all but that doesn't seem the thing to do either. I know it's all personal preference, but I'd like a general idea of what others' preferences are. I still have a manageable number of photos that I could go back and re-tag and categorize without too much pain. :)

Thanks!

Anna

PS - I did search on this topic but still didn't really get a good feel of what the difference between the two is.

[austriaka]

As you said, it is more a personal preference than anything else.
Categories you have to define before anything else, so their use is quite restricted and not very intuitive. Though they are good for structuring your images in a classical way (IE into "family", "animals", "holidays"...)
Tags are more like ideas you have about a photo, you don't have to know them before the moment you upload your photo. You just give keywords to the photo as you like.
Usually you will have a lot more tags than categories because human brain is working like that.

When using categories one tends to have more or less the same number of photos in each category since categories with less photos may be less interesting.
With tags it might be the opposite: the tags with less photos may contain the most interesting images because they are quite unique.

I stopped working with categories at all, I only use tags since this is more comfortable to me. I love browsing my archive page by tags since they reflect my thoughts on my images much better than any category ever could.

And one day somebody will write an addon to filter tags on category, this would be perfect at last :-)

[dakwegmo]

I tend to think of categories as major groups of images. You might sort them by subject, location, etc. but most images would normally only fall into one, maybe two categories. In essence categories are a very general grouping images.
Tags, on the other hand, tend to be very specific. Where a shot of your friends might fall into a general "people" or "friends" category. With tags you might be inclined to tag the photo with the names of all your friends, the location, event, day/night, etc. etc.

On my site, before I implemented tags, I had a very general category of flowers. Like Karin, I use tags almost exclusively now, so any flower shots I have get tagged with "flower", plus the type of flower if I know it, major colors in the image, location, etc.