Keedup Time Saver Special

"If you give us the time, we’ll save you the money"

Have you got at least 500 images waiting to be keyworded?  If you’re not in a hurry to get them done, you can get professional keywording at a bargain price.

New Zealand-based keywording company Keedup Ltd is offering Getty contributors keywording to the Getty standard at a special rate of US$0.99 per  image for batches of 500 or more, as long as you don’t mind waiting for your batch to be fitted in between other production.

They’ll do your images as soon as they can, with a guarantee they’ll be completed within three months at the very latest.  Your keywords can be returned in a custom designed spreadsheet or in the IPTC. Short unresearched captions are added free of charge.

Keedup defines the Getty Standard as:

A set of keywords which includes technical, literal and conceptual components to describe what can be seen in the image. The terminology used consists of preferred terms in accordance with Getty’s official submission guidelines. All literal terms are singular, no matter how many people or objects are pictured.

To find out more, contact Keedup's New Business Manager, Suzie Espie suzie@keedup.com, if you are interested.  You can also reach Suzie on +64 21 2789433 if you would prefer to discuss the deal on the phone. 

Terms and conditions of the Offer:

No samples will be done , and work will begin only once batches are received in full.  Images must be supplied as medium-resolution jpegs, with metadata in English in IPTC fields, or in a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet.  All specials are subject to payment in advance.  This offer may be cancelled or altered at any time.

Get the Keywording that Fits Your Needs, Not the Needs of the Keywording Company

Henry Ford famously said his customers could have a Model-T in "any colour - so long as it's black".  The idea was to make cars affordable by producing a single model.  That was a winner for Ford, but one colour definitely doesn't fit all when it comes to keywording photos and video clips.


Despite that, a number of keywording companies could be accused of offering "any keywording - so long as it's Getty".  The Getty submission standard for keywording is a great idea if your images are going to be sold by Getty, in fact it is mandatory.  But the terms used for Getty are not complete, don't include synonyms as such, and can be rather idiosyncratic (full suit for suit, or human hand for hand).


They are designed to integrate contributors' images into a much bigger vocabulary.  "Getty keywording" is not designed primarily as a stand-alone system.  So whilst Getty's search system and keywording is excellent, the words used to meet the submission standard have a very specific purpose which is unlikely to meet the needs of a photo library with a different search system and without the identical system to integrate with.

   

Keywords to be used directly on a photo library site, or for a site such as Alamy, need to be more intuitive and of a totally different style and depth.


The moral of the story is that companies recommending Getty keywording, or keywording similar to the Getty submission standard, but for non-Getty purposes, should be questioned closely about how they see that working in practice.  It may be they are offering that style of keywording simply to keep their costs down, rather than because it is suitable for the clients' needs.


Some companies will even try to shoehorn Getty submission standard keywording to fit other standards, such as for Corbis, by eliminating keywords which don't meet the other standard.
To protect yourself from this sort of inappropriate keywording, always ask for keywording according to the final use it will be put to, and go to at least two or three different companies.  


Look closely at their samples to see if you can detect differences between various standards on offer to make sure they aren't just thinly disguised copies of just one standard.

Trojan Horse Marketing Utilises Keywording

Keywording is a great way to make sure your images are found ahead of your competitors', so why not use them to help with a Trojan Horse marketing campaign to get your images noticed in the market?

A client recently approached us to keyword his images, but not primarily to help people searching his web site.  His theory was that whilst his existing customers knew about the standard of his photography, he was finding it hard to get his name known elsewhere.

His solution was to get together a few thousand images for submission to third party photo libraries such as Alamy, Getty and Fotosearch, have them extensively keyworded to a high standard, then reap the rewards of having his images rise like cream to the top of photo searches.

Whilst in the real world things never work quite that smoothly, the basic plan is sound:  by putting images (or video clips for that matter) into the general market, your name, or the name of your company, can become better known and general sales can improve.

Some things to bear in mind when conducting such a campaign:-

1. Use a representative, high-quality sample of your work.
2. Don't make the sample too small - that will mean your Trojan Horse will be too small to be seen, defeating the purpose of the exercise.  Think thousands not hundreds.
3.  Make sure your keywording is absolutely top-notch and meets the requirements of the libraries you are contributing to.
4.  If there is an option to include web addresses, phone numbers and so on in the metadata then make sure they are in there.  There is no point people finding your wonderful imagery, then not knowing how to contact you.
5.  Celebrity photographers/agencies in particular should also be thinking about how good keywording could bring images to the top of searches on sites of sub-agents in foreign territories.

Is Search Rage Losing You Sales?

Search rage is best defined as the uncontrollable frustration and anger resulting from being unable to find what is being searched for on the internet.  For businesses such as photo libraries, video libraries and on-line retailers that means lost sales.

The key thing for on-line libraries and retailers to understand is that people can get so annoyed that they may not return to your site, and certainly are likely to return to the sites of your competitors if the experience is significantly better.  The key driver of that frustration is how long it takes to find what is wanted.

Good keywording and simple search mechanisms are the answer to the problem, but it is not always obvious that this is necessary.  It is tempting to think only about existing customers and whether they can find what they're looking for in any one search session.  The problem is that those who were frustrated with how hard it was to find what they wanted have long since voted with their mice and gone elsewhere, which makes the problem all the harder to find. "None of our customers have complained so we don't think keywording is an issue", I was once told by a photo library which is now starting to lose sales to a keyword-conscious competitor.

And how badly do people get frustrated? According to a study by company Webtop, the answer is "very". Their study in 2000 showed about 1/3 reported difficulty searching to be "very frustrating," rising to nearly 3/4 reporting frustration of some significant degree (3 or above).

On a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is not at all frustrated and 5 is very frustrated, how frustrating do you find getting irrelevant information when web searching?

5 - Very frustrated	29%
4	17%
3	31%
2	11%
1 - Not at all frustrated	9%

Of even more interest perhaps was the question of how long iwas too long until searching the web drove people crazy? On average, 12 minutes, the survey found. The survey also showed that if searching could provide results in 3 minutes or less, only 7 percent of people would be frustrated.

So how long does it take before you get frustrated searching the Web for accurate information?

Longer than 15 minutes	49%
11-15 minutes	13%
6-10 minutes	15%
4-5 minutes	12%
2-3 minutes	3%
1 minute	1%
0-30 seconds	3%
Don't know	4%

So next time you wonder if your site is as searchable as it should be, try doing some very specific searches and see how long it takes to find what you need.  Using the table above you'll be able to get a good idea of how many customers and sales are at stake.

Turn Videos Into Stills To Save Keywording Time and Money

The time and expense of keywording video can be prohibitively high when clips are longer than a few seconds.  But there is a way to avoid that problem - by converting clips into a page of thumbnails.

Using one of the numerous thumbnail makers on the market, such as Scorp, you can display the important imagery within a video in a single still image.

By doing so, the keyworder no longer has to manipulate the clip to check what is in it, either by speeding up the video (dragging the control), or more slowly watching it in real time.  The major scenes in the video are revealed instantly and simultaneously (no chance to forget a crucial part of the video either).  This can save considerable time and make keywording more cost effective and accurate. This is particularly useful where videos last several minutes.

Reducing the large video file to a jpeg still, makes it faster and more economic to send across the internet to other companies to be keyworded.  Problems of software compatibility for various video file formats are also eliminated.

And the keyworded still itself can be used to give another search option to people looking for videos on the web.

Use of thumbnail stills will not work well, of course, where audio is important, but otherwise it is certainly something worth investigating.