The Mundane
There are several things taking my time up lately and most of them are rather mundane. I’m spending a lot of time keywording photographs. For some of you, this is not very important, all you need to do is keyword an image so you can find it quickly in your library. However, for many of us, this task, however painful and boring is critical. It ensures that others who are looking for a photograph can find what they are looking for. So someone who’s looking for a story, a concept or even a thought that needs to be illustrated with an image, will be able to type into a search engine a word that hopefully illustrates that point and presto, an image fitting their need pops up!
Here is how it might work. Lets say an in-flight magazine for an airlines like Egypt Air or Gulf Air is writing an article about an Egyptian destination, and they’re looking for photographs to illustrate it, they may have specific things in mind. Lets put ourselves in the shoes of an editor for a minute. We need a few photographs that illustrates traditional Egyptian culture. So we go to a stock house like PhotoShelter and type in some keywords that we think might link us to some images that will illustrate our article. In this case, we type in Egypt and galabeya (the long traditional Egyptian cloak worn by the men). What do we get? Well, several picture from Marco Ryan and hopefully the photo up above and a few more. The point is, you need to second-guess what terms people will be using to search. Actually, for the photo above the keywords are;
carpet, Egypt, galabeya, headdress, headgear, Islam, Male, Man, Muslim, Nile, Nubian, oriental rug, persian rug, robe, rug, sand, sunset, traditional, village, white
Good keywording helps sell your images. The trick to all this is consistency and quite frankly tenacity. Consistency is really another term for a controlled vocabulary. By maintaining a controlled vocabulary it makes searching easier. An example given by the folks over at controlledvocabulary.com (yes there really is a website by that name) is the Yellow Pages. Most everyone has used Yellow Pages in a phone book. When you look up “Car Dealers” you fine a notation to “see Automobile Dealers.” In a simple way this is what were talking about. Now, I’m not going to go into details on how controlled vocabulary works for two reasons: first, I don’t fully understand it myself, and second, the people at controlledvocabulary.com already understand it and have a whole website explaining it. By tenacity I mean, tenacity–sticking to it. It’s boring and tedious work to keyword photographs. But if you want to sell your images you need to have good keywording. Quite frankly, almost any keywords are better than no keywords.
I see keywording a little bit like backing up your hard drive. It’s a mundane task that is essential. There is some great software out there that makes backing up the hard drive easy and painless. I wish there was some software that would do the same with keywording a photograph. But, I think we are a long way from a photo being read by a computer and having the objects in it being identified and listed as keywords. Even if it could (and that would be a great start), there are still concepts within the photo that could never be read by computer like; loneliness, anger, joy etc… Maybe someday.
Could not agree more with you Matt, however I found away to reduce the time it takes to keyword images, the good thing about this method is, its an on going process that works with both Lightroom and Adobe Bridge, you compile lists where even and when ever you have the time or inclination and then import then into your chosed platform, all that remainds to do it select the images required and the associated keyword and bingo. For a full explination see here > http://bit.ly/9kDDXL Happy Keywording!!
Years back I set up a keywording business. We used Monks and Nuns – yes really – to do the work. IT was in effect an electronic scriptorium. These highly educated individuals, many who had taken vows of silence or were closed from the outside world, needed to have work that could fit to their unusual daily routine of rising early, breaking for prayers or meditation etc. They were brilliant at it and it gave their monastery or convent much needed income. ANyway we worked for agencies like Allsport captioning and keywording their archives that were – at the time being digitised. We provided them guidelines, a process and large bank of existing keywords.
My point is this. Mundane it may be, Critical is most assuredly is. It is painstaking work to keyword or caption a collection, particularly retrospectively. But as Matt points out – and as Allsports, Getty and others that we worked with knew – it was something worth doing right, consistently and doing as detailed a manner. Without it the image is unlikely to be found, and therefore unlikely to make a sell. In this Google enhanced days it is ALL the more critical.
I'll do some digging and see if I can find any old notes or info and then share it with you all.
Now time to take my own medicine and go and start key-wording that archive.
Thanks Michael. Nice link. There is also a whole list of keywords you can by and do the same thing with at HERE. My issue is that much of these pre-done list are not that helpful. Can you imagine finding words like “galabeya”, “felucca” or “purdah” on a pre-fad list. If course you are suggesting making your own, maybe there is a happy medium?
Marco, you still got the number for those monks?
I know where we can find monks and nuns- however, they are all more rich than I am.
It's been a fair while since I had to do any real keywording in anger so to speak but I do recall it being something of an odious task, even for a lover of language such as myself. The biggest or most frustrating problem I found initially was in actually thinking of the words. One tip to get around that, and whilst I don't of course advocate stealing in any form (I think of it more as creative learning) is to take a lead from others.
What I mean is, if I imagine myself having taken the shot above, the only keywords that come to mind are carpet, sand, Egypt. If I put that into the search engine and I see the results, then at that point i'm learning a whole new vocabulary …words like 'galabeya' that I just wasn't aware of at all are now a part of 'my' vocabulary.
I'm not suggesting stealing someone elses keywords since (apart from the morality) that would be a bit of a flawed strategy. Your keywords obviously need to be relevant to your own image or you'll end up being in results you don't want to be in, and not being in the ones you do at which point you'll get no sales. As a away of learning and expanding your vocabulary though, it's every bit as good as reading a thesaurus.
Matt, are you using Photoshelter to sell most of your images? Or, are you using another service as well?
Getty has a fairly useful keywording guide online at http://imagery.gettyimages.com/getty_images_key…
It gets more into the non-obvious keywords, which is often a big help, particularly for more generic imagery.
The digital era has made library scientists out of all of us. Keywording will be the essential key for sales in the future. It has also made us specialists where we learn the easiest route to success in stock photography is to begin photographing in a specialized niche you really enjoy. Once you collect a good selection of images, photobuyers who need your subject area will start coming to you for two reasons. 1.) you have a deep selection of images in an area they are presently researching. 2.) keywording is not difficult or boring because you are shooting subject matter that you enjoy. Besides you are familiar with the vocabulary and i.d. of the pictures. No thesauras is needed.
The benefits of working this way: 1.) You are on a first-name basis with your buyers. 2.) you develop a monopoly in this sector. 3.) You are able to consult with the buyer which makes you a mini-expert they go back to whenever they need pictures in your category of interest.
Rohn Engh sellphotos.om
Don’t create collections for information that’s already provided by the metadata. For example, the IPTC metadata already allows you to store the country, state and location in which a photos was taken, and is conveniently extracted by the metadata browser.
Thanks so much!
nosšćom nu starijim godinama. Narcisizam je druga strana usamljenosti – oba su posledica p