Tags and notes!

We’ve released the intitial versions of two cool new features, tags — which allow you to sort your photos for easy finding — and notes — which allow you to annotate regions of photos, pointing out the people, places and things which make up the story.

Here are some examples of the notes feature at work: at lunch and in treehouses.

Tags are ultra-simple keywords that you can apply to photos. We keep a list of the 150 most popular tags, but you’ll also find tags next to the images themselves (example). Click on one of them — say, ‘garden’ — and you’ll find all of that person’s photos of gardens. Click again, and you’ll see all the photos in the system that have been tagged with ‘garden’.

Stay tuned: both tags and notes will evolve on the road to Flickr’s version 1.0 and become even easier and more useful.