Help us tag the nation's paintings

To coincide with the launch of Your Paintings, our partners at the Public Catalogue Foundation are launching Your Paintings Tagger, giving you the opportunity to help map what's in the national painting collection.

Currently we have only basic information about each painting on the site such as title, artist, and execution date. What we don't have is any information about the type of painting, the subjects portrayed in the paintings and the styles and movements represented. Tagging each painting will provide this information, enabling Your Paintings to be searched by users in a much more sophisticated and easily accessible manner.

By looking at the paintings in detail, 'taggers’ will be able to help generate useful subject classifications for each work and supply important keyword information such as the people, places and events shown in the painting. Each painting will be tagged a number of times and algorithms behind the scenes will calculate which tags are likely to be the most accurate. The tags will then be fed through to the Your Paintings website.

The algorithms that power Tagger have been created by the Citizen Science Alliance, based at the Astrophysics Department at the University of Oxford. They were the team behind the hugely successful Galaxy Zoo website.

If you'd like to get involved - just click here to start tagging!

More information:

- Watch a video demonstration of Tagger with artist Alison Watt
- Find out more information about tagger