I just keep my flickr page photos in the order they're uploaded. I didn't really tag much at first, but now I've gotten better at tagging my photos. As I get enough photos to merit it, I'll create a set, assuming at some point somebody might actually want to see my mix disc covers or pictures of Chicago all together.

Ok, I asked badly.

If you tag a photo with "Baptist" does Flickr find that photo on a search for "Religion"? If you tag it "Cat" does it shop up on a search for "Pet"? If you tag it "Doctor" does it show up on a search for "Medical"?

huh? I thought they were organized alphabetically.

Flickr does do stuff on the back-end so link up similar tags -- i.e. cat, kitten, kitty, etc are all related so they can be done in clusters.

I don't think it works that way, ortho. If you search for Baptist, you're going to get shown all photos that have the word Baptist as a tag, but you're not going to get any other photos that merely have related tags. Under each photo, however, you're going to be shown other tags that the photos have, and you have the option of clicking on them. I don't know the terminology for what I'm describing, unfortunately. The way you're describing would be fantastic, as an option.

Am I talking out my butt? Let's test it and see!

I WISH Flickr's tags were that smart. They're not, as far as I can tell... a search for a word brings back tags of that exact word only.

Flickr tagging is totally flat, 100% flat. The only thing they are likely to do is when you do a tag search, they may suggest other tags implying strongly that they have some sort of thesaurus, also a dictionary. Now that I've said this, of course, I can't figure out where I was doing this yesterday, but you can see it in their clustering setup. Tags can be combined too, but not weighted.

People can organize their own photos, putting like photos together into sets or groups and Flickr may do some back end brain work to determine that if you put a set of photos together, their tags may be related, but otherwise they're flat flat flat.