At some point in time last year, I wanted to join a Flickr group which aims to catalogue as many of the world’s species as possible. I may not have great photos, but I do have photos of critters that don’t interest just anyone, and if I could add something useful to the Encyclopædia of Life…well, good. The problem is that the group requires submissions to have taxonomic machine tags (which makes perfect sense–more effective searching), and there was just nooooo way I was going through all 1400-and-whatever photos one-by-one to add machine tags to suitable images. I found a link to an automatic tag generator in the forums, emailed the link to the page on iNaturalist myself (so it didn’t get lost in my bookmarks), and…promptly forgot about it all winter. This morning, I was looking for something else and ran across the email, so I decided to give it a shot. I tried a few dragonflies, damselflies and true bugs by common name, and came up with one result–Acrosternum hilare. I tried by common name and binomial, but got nothing for any of the dragons or damsels except Widow Skimmer. Woo-hoo. The rest had no results at all, and therefore couldn’t generate any tags. WTF kind of “naturalist” site can’t manage to have a record for some of the most common insects in the eastern region of the third-largest (and remarkably diverse) land mass in the world? It came up with my box turtle, and mayapple (two non-insects that I picked at random), so it’s not that it’s focused upon European species or something; apparently, it just doesn’t have much for insects…one of the largest (if not the largest) groups of living creatures on the planet. Go figure. Anyway, I guess I’m not going to be contributing to the EOL unless I can find another machine tag generator because there’s just no goddamned way I’m sitting there and typing it all out. By the time I finished, the odonate powers-that-be would probably have reclassified half of my dragons and damsels.