http://beta.rpol.net/test/portest2.html is pretty close to reality.  Keyword searching can actually be seen by selecting a portrait in a game over on the beta site.

Tagging input is pretty similar, just ignore the and/or selection and the exclude column and that's pretty much how it looks.

Free text entry isn't implement yet, however.


To start it off:

As much as I liked the series, is "Alian (Babylon 5)" really justified?

Let's see... Here's some thoughts...

What about adding a fourth age category? Considering how common games featuring teens are, it might make more sense to have that category, rather than trying to decide if any given picture should go in "Young" or "Adult." I know that as it is I'll end up searching both when I want to make a character that age. Though it might be fine to leave it as you have it if the categories are well-defined.

How about a "Purple" hair category? "Silver?" Or maybe just a "Miscellaneous" one? At some point, categorizing anything but natural hair colors becomes an exercise in adding unnecessary categories.

Why not just "Curls" rather than "Curls/Perm?"

To get, briefly and inexpertly, into anthropological theory, I'm not sure "Ethnicity" is the best word for the categories you've got now. Those are largely "racial" categories (though anthropologists really dislike the word "race").

Where would a Mexican or South American character go? Many of them have both European and native ancestors to varying degrees. "American Indian" would likely be considered technically correct for some of them (though it's definitely not common usage in North America to refer to South American indigenous groups by that term) and "Caucasian" for others. I'd consider adding a category, probably "Hispanic." This is very much more an "ethnic" category than a "racial" category, though. The US Census asks for both, so someone of European descent would pick White/Caucasian and then they'd also pick "Hispanic origin" or "not of Hispanic origin."

What about the Middle East or India? Racially they'd likely fall into the "Caucasian" group but they're very culturally different from people descended from European cultures -- definitely a different ethnicity.

And, from a totally different viewpoint, how visually distinct would an African and an Australian Aborigine be to the average user?

The way I've done it is we can have;

256 "Criteria" (that is, the rows; Kingdom, Gender, Age).
256 predefined "keywords" per criteria.

I'm not advising we should go anywhere near that amount, but that's the smallest amount I can store in mySQL, so there it is.

Adding more criteria and keywords is not a problem, either now or in the future.  Removing or changing now is fine but not really advisable in the future.

So we can easily change stuff around now, I've only put an hour or two into the current tags so it's not a drama if we have to completely redo them.

From my school of thought we shouldn't hesitate to add another keyword if it has fairly clear boundaries and it'll be reasonably well used (roughly say in at least 5% of images?).

So, I don't see why we shouldn't have a lot of colours for hair.  It's pretty obvious if something's green or blue.  Pink and red might be a bit 'iffy', but so's black and brown.

On the other hand ages can be very subjective.  No point having "very young", "young", "early teens", "mid teens", "late teens" as you're just going to find that most of the young portraits are tagged with 3 or 4 of each.  That's not to say that age doesn't require a bit of tweaking, I think it does.

Lastly, "miscellaneous" or "other" isn't necessary, if it's not any of the available keywords then don't tag it when any, it doesn't have to be tagged.  If someone wants some strange hair colour that's not on the list then they can exclude the ones they don't want, that's what the exclusion is there for.


As for a manga gallery, let's stick to the topic at hand?

Some suggested additions:



Kingdom: Bird, Insect, Amphibian, (Do we really need 'mineral' in there?)

Hair Color: Dyed (for those looking for the bright colors)

Hair Length: Braids, Up, Pony-tail

Race: Anthro, Angel, Winged Human/Humanoid, Vampire, fairy

Ethnicity: Hispanic, blue, green, purple, red (for all our non-natural skin toned portraits)

Attire: Robes, Hood, Hat, Jewelry, Mask, glasses, helm/helmet, coat/cloak  (I'd rather like 'none' taken out, as we have no nudes (though not for some people's lack of trying) and n/a means don't check anything)

Medium: Maybe add 'Anime'

Possibly add another catch-all category for some common themes:  sword, gun, bow, staff, other weapon, piercings, cigar/cigarette, mustache, beard, tattoo

What about expression - smiling, scowling, glaring, happy, calm  (just a suggestion) :P

Okay, that's all I can think of at the moment

Surely portrait submissions would request the relevant keywords to now accompany the file?