Imgur, the pop­u­lar image-shar­ing site, is mak­ing it eas­i­er for users to find the pic­tures they’re inter­est­ed in with some new features.

Find­ing what inter­ests you…

Social media man­agers and com­mu­ni­ty man­agers who pre­side over bur­geon­ing com­mu­ni­ties will be famil­iar with the dif­fi­cul­ty users can face when a social net­work real­ly takes off: the sheer quan­ti­ty of con­tent post­ed makes it very dif­fi­cult for them to find what they’re inter­est­ed in. With 1.5 mil­lion images being uploaded with each pass­ing day, Imgur has decid­ed it needs to do more to live up to its rep­u­ta­tion as “The Sim­ple Image Sharer.”

Prin­ci­pal among the new sift­ing fea­tures (which have been test­ed with sev­er­al thou­sand Ing­mur users) is the intro­duc­tion of tags: peo­ple can now tag indi­vid­ual pic­tures which users can then down­vote or upvote. It’s also pos­si­ble for Imgur vis­i­tors to cre­ate cus­tom gal­leries using sev­er­al dif­fer­ent tags, fil­ter­ing out the ones they’re not inter­est­ed in, mak­ing search­ing the site a good deal more efficient.

The startup’s CEO and founder, Alan Schaaf, isn’t antic­i­pat­ing that the tags will be bor­ing­ly straight­for­ward cat­e­go­ry labels. Instead, he hopes they’ll most­ly be clever or wit­ty with­out veer­ing way off top­ic (and with­out breach­ing the site’s empha­sis on “nice­ness”). All user-sub­mit­ted tags can be seen when users look at an image but, for sort­ing pur­pos­es, only the two most pop­u­lar ones will be used.

… with­out splin­ter­ing the community

But those com­mu­ni­ty man­agers we just men­tioned may be won­der­ing why a site as pop­u­lar as Imgur has become in the five years since its launch hadn’t already offered sift­ing capa­bil­i­ties like this.

Schaaf explained to TechCrunch jour­nal­ist Antho­ny Ha that up until now, the startup’s empha­sis has been on hold­ing its users togeth­er, with the site func­tion­ing as “one big buck­et, one big pool” acces­si­ble by all from the home page. He was wary about any­thing that might splin­ter the site’s user base. As he put it to Ha:

“We’re not try­ing to intro­duce sub-com­mu­ni­ties. Imgur is one big community.”

The new fea­tures, as our intre­pid com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er will quick­ly see, seek to strike exact­ly the right bal­ance between main­tain­ing com­mu­ni­ty cohe­sion and improv­ing image dis­cov­ery (users can now click on an image’s tag to find oth­er relat­ed content).