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10. Keywords
10.1. Introduction to Keywords
Before you start to upload, you want your images to include keywords, title and description. This information is stored as IPTC data within your jpg file.
You could add your keywords after uploading. but by doing this before uploading, you'll only need to do this once. This saves you an enormous amount of time.
10.2. The importance of keywords
Keywords enable the buyer to find your images. No need to tell take they are very important. I think they are at least as important as the image itself. Why ?
Designers or publishers don't have time to search a site for hours just to find that perfect image. For them time is money. So they try to find a suitable image as quick as possible. Chances are great that they take the first suitable image they come across.
By choosing good keywords you increase your the possibility that your images come up in the search results.
10.3. Please don't SPAM
After reading the above, many will think it's good or desired to attach as many keywords you can think of. Even some which don't relate entirely to the image.
I won't do this. And this for 2 reasons.
10.3.1. No increase in sales
Strange enough stuffing your image with all kind of keywords don't increase sales dramatically. This may seems strange, but actually it logical.
If you have an image of a butterfly and included "sexy" and "woman" into the keywords, in order to let your image show up in a "sexy woman" search. Do you really think such a designer will buy your butterfly image when he's looking for a sexy woman image ? No I don't think so.
I would even say more. Such practices could even work out bad for your image. Let assume a buyer is searching for an image of a butterfly. But in his search results show up a lot of images including a woman (for instance a woman holding a butterfly, women with butterfly body-paint, ...) and he only wants a single butterfly alone, just like your image.
In order to get rid of those unwanted search results, the designer excluded the word 'woman' in his search. And there you have it -> your image will no longer show up in his results.
Therefor provide only relevant keywords with your images. This will most likely increase your sales more the when you spam. Besides, sites are getting tougher all the time on keyword spamming. You don't want to run into trouble.
10.3.2. Chance of being warned or banned
Keyword spam frustrates photo buyers because irrelevant photos appear in the results. In order to keep their customers happy, agencies are increasing their efforts to keep their keywords clean. And in my opinion they will only increase their efforts in the future.
In the worst case they can block or even erase your account. So this is something you really don't wanna mess with.
10.4. Which keywords do we add ?
When English isn't your native language, finding the right keywords isn't always easy. You could search for similar images on the various stocksites and see which keywords they use, but to do this images by image on each site would be time consuming. Luckily there are some sites which can help us in this search.
10.4.1. Photokeywords.com
Photokeywords is a tool, now owned by Yuri Arcurs, which helps you finding the correct keywords.
How does it work?
- You type in the form above several basic keywords, which exactly describe your image. You can use search engines of shutterstock or luckyoliver. You can also combine the results of search.
- Among the results of search you choose several images which are most similar to yours.
- The site automatically takes the keywords from the chosen images and demonstrates them. Identical keywords which coincide in the chosen images will be removed automatically. Also the list of keywords will be automatically sorted by frequency of use in the chosen images and then by the popularity of retrieval requests to make easier your final selection of keywords.
- First 50 words in the list are marked as most relevant to the image.
- After you make all the necessary changes, the final list of keywords is generated.
Underneath some screenshots from the site.
10.4.2. findphotokeywords.com
Findphotokeywords.com is an other site which does almost the same as photokeywords.com. But on this site we can look for images on Dreamstime, Fotolia and istock too.
Underneath a screenshot.
10.5. How do we add keywords ?
Now we know the importance of providing good and accurate keywords. But have do we attach those onto an image ?
10.5.1. Photoshop
Although not ideal, we can do this in photoshop.
Go to File > File info. You'll get a pop-up window with several field. In one of them you can add your keywords.
But photoshop is certainly not to best option. Although you can enter your keywords, there is no way to copy/paste them in an easy way. And maybe more important, you want to organize your keywords for future use.
10.5.2. Bridge
At the moment I'm using Bridge. You can make different keyword sets. By selecting a certain set, all the keywords in that set are attached to your image at once. Once you made a useful number of such sets keywording becomes less irritating :o)
But photoshop and the bridge are not free nor cheap. Therefor I've looked at some cheap are free alternatives. I haven't used any of these myself, but I'm sure some people uses them to add keywords.
10.5.3. Other Programs
Pro Stock Master : costs $49 which is not really cheap. But this program seems very promising. It's specially designed for stock photographers, so I think this could be useful. Haven't used it myself, but will certainly try it out once I have a little time (you can try it for free).
Photo Info : -freeware- "Microsoft Photo Info is a new software add-in for Microsoft Windows that allows photographers to add, change and delete common "metadata" properties for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer."
Ifranview : -freeware- I used ifranview in the past as a easy and free image viewer but I've never used it to add keywords.
Exifer : -cardware- A program which is often named. But because there are no updates anymore it's maybe not the best choice.
Stock Photo Assistant : Only free to try, but with $13 it's not expensive either. It seems to have a rather simple ability to add keywords but it has also an build in 'uploader'. Maybe to combination of that makes it useful.
Image Keyworder : Only launched in July 2007 and it's not for free. But the features seem impressive, so I'll probably check this one out.
10.6. Related Links
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Chris Hughes |
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Chris Hughes on keywording
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Ellen Bough blog |
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PartI of an article from Ellen Boughn on Dreamstime
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Ellen Bough blog |
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PartII of an article from Ellen Boughn on Dreamstime
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Ellen Bough blog |
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PartIII of an article from Ellen Boughn on Dreamstime
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Dan Heller |
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Dan Heller on the role of keywording in the future of stockphotography
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Dan Heller |
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Dan Heller on the meaning of ranking your keywords (like Fotolia aks)
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