Bookmarking revisited

In the last couple of days I have been thinking more and more about Flickr. One of the tools that we didn’t use while travelling was the tag tool. So I hopped back onto my old Flickr site and tagged a few of the more obscure photos. I then started investigating their usefulness. When you search for photos you can search by full text or by tags, all users or your own photos. I added the tag Faenza to my photos taken in Faenza, a small town in Italy. When I did a search of all users via the Faenza tag, no photos came up. When I did a search of all users full text, there were 10,074 photos. That means more than 10,000 photos of Faenza, and none of them were tagged to locate them more easily. I understand tagging if you have 10,000 of your own photos and you want to be able to find them again. But as long as you give each photo a title, this shouldn’t be a problem. I also ran this experiment with a more general tag. An all users full text search for Iran found 351,908 photos, all users tag search for Iran located 267,847 results. So a huge number and the photos were not more relevant, there were just less found. Maybe if everyone used tags it would be more effective. Or maybe I have missed the point. I need to look into this further.