Clothing attributes

Often the attribute of a clothing is called the type of clothing in contemporary speech. This is a common gotcha when it comes to tagging pictures.

The issue we are trying to solve here is how do we tag images with clothes in a searchable manner without having to place a million tags by hand, and without having basically unreadable compound tags?

Common scenario and terms

To keep these ideas readable one common scenario and common terms are used for every suggestion that displays the main issue for clothing tags. Suggestions use the same (debatable) tag rules where for example a tag like clothing:silk is not parented to the unnamspaced silk. Please note that these are simply a way to explain and not a specific element of the solution suggestion.

The terms are element and attribute, where element means a piece of clothing, so a dress, or a sock, and an attribute means something that that element is, so a red dress, or a frilled sock.

The scenario is a specific case of a multiple-attribute clothing element. An image that has a frilled, red, silken dress in it.

Solution suggestion 1. Single attribute clothing tags

This idea suggests that we add only single attributes to clothing tags. A user tagging this image would then type this (inner bullets are from parents, repeated children are not shown):

• clothing:red dress
  • clothing:dress
    • dress
• clothing:frilled dress
  • clothing:frills
    • frills
• clothing:silk dress
  • clothing:silk

One of the major advantages to this idea is quickly visible. With proper use of tag parents a lot of typing can be taken out of the users hand. Three typed tags included in eight searchable tags. This is coincidentally also one of the big disadvantages of this solution, the amount of tag parents this requires. (By far not as many as suggestion 2 though.)

We feel this solution solves the ease of tagging problem, and also the unreadable compound tags problem.

Solution suggestion 2. All attribute clothing tags

This idea suggests that we add all attributes to one clothing tag. All attributes are added in some "canon" order, most likely alphabetically. Let's see how a user would use this(inner bullets are from parents, repeated children are not shown):

• clothing:frilled red silk dress
  • clothing:frills
    • frills
  • clothing:silk
    • silk
  • clothing:dress
    • dress

Note how the user only has to add one tag. This is the biggest advantage, and also the biggest disadvantage. The user has to know the order of the attributes before typing, and editing a tag like that is a massive pain as well. This solution requires loads of parents. Even more than solution suggestion 1. Since every combination of attributes needs to be parented for every clothing element. This would be a massive undertaking. 

This sounds like a good idea when you just read it, but in reality this makes it hard to add tags to images, which is a massive problem, and it also requires innumerable parents.

Ideas and messages from discord

Let's examine the tag frills which is common on the boorus. The tag frills could be used when any form of frills appears inside the picture. This could be on a frill curtain, the neck frills of an animal or a frilled apron. Only one of these is clothing. Hence when we want to be explicit we assign clothing:frilled apron .

This is one of the benefits of the clothing: namespace for clothing enthusiasts. It lets them search and tag pictures with clothing specifically. If they did a general search on a big database only running frills they may end up with results of neck-frilled lizards and lord knows what kind of abominations instead of lovely clothes. It also lets them do a wildcard search on clothes insides the namespace containing the desired attribute e.g. clothing:frill*.

"Would it not be easier to search (and faster too) to parent all of those to clothing:frills which is then also parented to un-namespaced frills? I feel like the clothing:frilled apron tag is just a nested namespace in disguise. This could then be done for every attribute. Think clothing:seethrough, clothing:silk, clothing:red (though tagging clothes colours may be a bit out there I feel it diplays the point well)

It becomes especially problematic when you have say a frilled silk dress. Would you then tag clothing:frilled silk dress or clothing:silk frilled dress? (don't even get me started on a colour as well.) There are multiple options, either you limit to one sub-namespace: (there would be a lot of parents but with a somewhat managed list of attributes that could be automated) clothing:silk dress (parent of: clothing:silk, clothing:dress) clothing:frilled dress (parent of clothing:frills, clothing:dress)

Or you decide on an order (like how we did with X on Y tags for actions) I don't like this due to being harder to search (as seen above) and being harder to remember which is right. What could be neat with this is to have the large tower of attributes sorted by alphabet which you parent out into smaller towers, though that would be hell to maintain(even if it would please my autism brain) (and it would make for weird tag lists like):

clothing:frilled red dress

clothing:red dress

clothing:frilled dress

clothing:dress

clothing:frills

clothing:red (maybe too much to also do this lmao)

There may be more options for this as well, but I prefer the 'one sub-namespace' option the most."

-from matjojo