Tagging Character Traits

For the past few months, i've noticed a lot of people leaving out things such as hair/eye color when tagging. Look at the tag history for post #736728. That's how my encounters generally go, with maybe 1 or 2 more tags at the start. I've seen plenty of images from some old or obsure anime that i've never even begun to have heard of, and while the characters/series/artist is tagged, hair/eye color is usually not. I've also seen images with plenty of characters who are all tagged, but the bluntly obvious traits are left out due to laziness or otherwise. And a lot of times, the approver of an image doesn't even bother to add missing tags. I know that OCD is a liar, but it's not lying when it tells me to add character traits.

Aren't tags generally supposed to be used when they describe the most distinctive features of a character? I mean, like how you don't tag "legs" for every single person that has legs, but only for pics where the legs are a distinct focus of the image.

The hair & eye color tags often make sense for solo pics, but when you start having more than two people in one pic, I almost always leave them off unless the characters & source aren't known.

(But maybe I'm doing it wrong. Anyone else's thoughts on the matter?)

Even if there are multiple characters, especially if the characters don't have their own character tags, then I think it still makes a lot of sense to tag at least hair color. Some attributes, like hair color tend to stick in a person's mind so if they're searching for a specific image they came across they could still go "well I remember there was 3 girls, one had red hair and one had blue hair, and it was at the beach."
3girls beach (164 results) vs 3girls beach red_hair (21 results) vs 3girls beach red_hair blue_hair (4 results).

In general though, foreground characters and possibly near background characters need attribute tags. I'd say far background characters usually don't need to get any attribute tags, though exceptions probably exist.

I always tag basic character traits on my uploads, and used to always add them to images I moderated, though I haven't had the time to do it recently.

I think it's pretty important though, as the basic artist/copyright/character isn't sufficient to keep images from getting lost and buried, especially with more popular characters.

What's even more important is to tag anything meaningful that is unique for that character (in addition to basic traits), those are the tags that really help find an image later.

I just try to tag everything that I know after I give the picture a good looking over. With pictures with many character like post #691933, people tag every single character, and none of the traits for any of them, and that's just weird. We go by the "tag what you see" rule, and how can you not see all of those hair and eye colors?

I have to admit I don't see much point in tagging say, a patchouli knowledge picture with purple hair and purple eyes. "patchouli knowledge, touhou, solo, purple hair, purple eyes" is pretty much useless for finding a particular picture because that fits too many of them. And I say this as someone who adores purple.

With an image with a fairly large number of people (say, 8 and up), the thing I tend to remember the most about it is that it's a group image. My tagging reflects this; the more characters in the image the fewer character attributes I tag.

We all know that characters don't always have to have the same hair/eye color. As much as I don't like it, many artists choose to draw Felicia with green eyes instead of blue. I could be looking for a particular picture of her with blue eyes, but since someone was lazy, I can't find it. It's weird that people know every anime character from every anime ever made, ever, but they're either colorblind, or they don't know what the color purple is. And I like purple more than you, so back off.

I believe that tagging a Patchouli Knowledge picture with purple hair and purple eyes because someone looking for purple hair or eyes will want to see them. Despite the popularity of Touhou, not everyone knows the characters and their traits by name.

I agree with you on the group picture tagging. The little details feel less important as they make up a much smaller portion of the picture, and someone searching for those attributes is most likely less interested in the picture as a whole.