Magnum Photos Use Mechanical Turk To Tag Images

Prestigious photo agency, Magnum Photos, has teamed up with New York start-up Tagasauris to harness the facilities of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk services to revamp their image metadata, it was revealed recently.  The venture significantly reduces the labour-intensive overhead that metadata entry incurs by farming out the task to the enormous pool of labour available worldwide via the service.

“Mechanical Turk is a “marketplace for work”, which gives businesses and developers “access to an on-demand, scalable workforce”. The web service, which launched in 2005, allows its users to post Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) – as the name suggests, tasks that require human input and cannot be easily accomplished by machine. Reading a photo, understanding the significance of its visual content and translating it into words, for example.  Responding to these posts are workers around the world. While some tasks can be done by anyone who registers, others require completion of a qualification test, as with Magnum’s new keywording labour force, which is managed and monitored by Tagasauris. [Read More]”

Share this Article: