Keywording Central

Freelance Keyworders Plus and Minus

2011-01-20T11:40:00.000+13:00

With the downturn in the economy, there has reportedly been a surge in numbers of freelance keyworders. This pool of labour can fill an important gap, but there are potential problems too.

There is a clear advantage in being able to add such people to your staff quickly, and dispense with their services when they are no longer needed. Often they have good skills, having keyworded for a photo library or libraries before. At the very least they will have knowledge of the picture business if they have come from sales or the photography side of a photo library. Ideally then, freelance keyworders can be a pool of skilled labour which can be called upon whenever the need arises.

So what could possibly be wrong with that?

To start with, the ease with which freelancers can be employed is very much a double-edged sword. As easily as you can dispense with their services, they can decide to work elsewhere. This is particularly so if the work you offer them is sporadic. It is likely that in time they will find more regular work elsewhere, and the next time you call them they will already be booked.

There is also a tendency for the overall pool of freelancers to expand and contract based on economic conditions. Those keyworders who are working freelance may well be doing so out of necessity, and when a permanent position comes up they are likely to take it, especially if it’s their old job.

Freelancers, for all their skills, will always need some level of training. If your system has a controlled vocabulary, that might be considerable. If you’re likely to keep that person a long time that’s great, but if they are likely to leave in a short time, then it might not make economic sense.

Because freelancers are not on staff, you have less control over what they do. Should a bad mistake be made with keywords – perhaps even libellous or with other legal consequences – you may not be in much of a position to call them to account. Day-to-day supervision may be a problem if the freelancer wants to work from home.

So before hiring freelance labour, read through these tips:

Find out early about their work intentions – Is this a temporary state of affairs, or are they likely to be loyal (proxy) staff members?
Ask who else they work for – If there is a big company using their services, you are likely to run into availability problems.
Get references from previous employers – Just because someone says they are a keyworder, it doesn’t mean they are good or even have experience. Even if they have experience in one type of keywording, it may not be transferrable to what you need.
If possible, use them for work requiring little training – That will keep down costs and make them easier to replace.
Think carefully about whether to have freelancers work from home – It is far harder to train them and give timely feedback about their work when they aren’t in your office
Don’t be seduced by the relative cheapness – quality of keywording is a major consideration, so don’t fall into the trap of sacrificing quality just to save a little money.
Get them on a contract if possible – Try to get them to commit to a regular amount of work to solve the problem of availability, provided that would fit with your workflow – a regular commitment may not work for you.
Before going down the freelance route, consider very carefully other option – It may well be better to hire them permanently or use an outsourced service which has just as much flexibility but is far more reliable.
Count the full cost – Before hiring, work out exactly how much a freelancer will cost, including the cost of them being in the office, being trained and supervised.
What if they up and left? – Consider how badly your business would be affected if the freelancer up and left without warning.

Your In-house Keywording Is Just Fine – Or Is It?

2010-12-20T17:06:00.000+13:00

Keywording in-house, rather than using an outsourced solution, is often a good fit. To make it even better, consider having your work audited. It will keep your keywording in line with industry trends, and highlight areas for improvement.

Whilst in-house keywording teams have the advantage of learning the exact idiosyncrasies and nuances of the system being used, there is a danger that the system itself can be left behind by what is happening elsewhere in the world of metadata, or can become too well suited to people inside the organisation, rather than the general public.

In celebrity keywording, for instance, there is a trend towards including designer labels in clothing descriptions. If your keywording doesn’t follow that trend, you may find yourself being eclipsed by competitors. With stock keywording there has been a trend towards more conceptual words, and tighter keywording to better-focus search results.

It should be remembered that as an image or video library grows and changes, so do its keywording and metadata requirements. A library of 10,000 items is a totally different beast from one which is 200,000 in size, where more elaborate systems are called for. Customers’ requirements will also change over time, as will the standard of keywording being offered by your competitors – sales can suffer dramatically if you don’t keep up with these changes.

You may also find that at some point you want to submit to larger image and video aggregators such as Getty Images, Alamy, Corbis or Framepool. If so, the in-house system you are using may be well off the mark for meeting the requirements of these companies – in fact that’s almost guaranteed.

With particularly small teams of keyworders – down to a single part-timer for instance – there is a danger of capture and keywording drift. What that boils down to is that the person keywording, left to their own devices, decides entirely what should be done for better or worse and that standard may not be what was originally envisaged. Worse, there can be drift in the way keywording is carried out, the vocabulary being used and so on, so that keywording in older parts of the archive is totally out of step with newer parts.

In all of these cases, the best way to stay on track, and get the keywording you need, is to get someone from the outside to look at what you are doing, sample various parts of the archive and report back. If everything is humming along nicely then it’s good to know that. It’s even more important to know about the problems so you can address them before throwing more money down the drain on inadequate work.

And because the critique is coming from outside the organisation, it is likely to be an easier message to deliver to colleagues who you also regard as friends.

Perhaps you already know of a metadata professional who can audit your keywording for you. If not, try talking to keywording outsource companies and see if they will do an audit for you.

Try The No Keywords Test

2010-10-29T17:33:00.000+13:00

If you want to put yourself in the shoes of your customers for a while, and find out the value of keywording, try the "no keywords" test.

Take a selection of images or videos and remove all keywords (if they have any). Add them to your photo/video library as duplicates. Then carry out a search to see how easily you can find those images/videos using your quick search window - this is the window used by the vast majority of researchers.

To make it realistic, see if you can find the images/videos using search terms other than the literal name of what you are searching for. You can try colours, concepts, themes, the type of object (eg if there is a picture of an apple, try searching using "fruit"), and see what results you get.

If the keyworded images/videos are coming up more quickly and more readily, then you'll get a fair idea of how much better your keywording is than no keywords at all, and also whether metadata you use other than the keywords field is of much use. Record the time taken to complete each task if you want to be scientific about it.

You can use the same method to evaluate different keywording methods and standards.

Keyword Health = Photo Library Health

2010-10-22T16:41:00.000+13:00

If you want to know if a photo library is thriving, there's a very good way to find out without (fruitlessly) trying to get hold of sales figures and balance sheets - look at the keywording.

Whilst this is hardly a precise scientific measure of success, you can learn a lot from a company's keywords, like whether you should be contributing your images or videos to them, whether they have good cashflow, and whether they are as professional as they should be.

And here are three reasons why:

1. Keywording is a habit shared by the successful - and they must know something . Getty Images, Splash News, Corbis, Frame Pool - emphasis on good-quality keywording is just part of the game for such market leaders. So if it's worthwhile for them, it should be worthwhile for any other successful and/or well-organised photo library. They must have the figures to prove it, or they wouldn't be doing it.

2. If you have the money for keywording, then you are likely to be putting money into other important areas such as advertising and sales. A full-on marketing effort is likely to produce good sales and healthy cash flow. Poor keywording, or rudimentary keywording is a sign that the library is struggling to free up staff, or purchase outsourced keywording for this basic function. If they aren't doing that right, what else aren't they doing to market images and get sales?

3. Big is beautiful in the image business, so if the library isn't big enough to need keywording, then perhaps the library isn't a substantial player. It's easy to understand how a "mom and pop" operation would tend to be small and disorganised. If there really aren't enough images or videos to make keywording necessary, then customers are likely to be going elsewhere.

So if you are planning to deal with a photo or video library, take some time to have a look at the keywording and if it isn't up to scratch, ask why.

Rubbish In, Rubbish Out

2010-10-18T17:48:00.000+13:00

There is an old saying in computing: "rubbish in, rubbish out". The same goes for keywording and captioning. If your keywording goes awry, perhaps the real reason is in the poor metadata you supplied in the first place.

Generally speaking, keyworders aren't mind readers, whether they are on staff or in outside companies. That means they are unlikely to be able to identify every species of bird, or know every city or building in a particular country. So rather than risk them guessing wrongly, or not including the information at all, make sure all metadata supplied is as full and accurate as possible.

If research is going to be required, you should let the keyworder know where to find the best sources of information, preferably on the internet.

You can also save time and money by getting the language, grammar and spelling correct, particularly spelling of names. There is usually no spell check for people's names, even those of celebrities, so the onus has to be on the photographer/videographer or photo library to get such details correct in the first place.

If you feel that photographers/videographers can't get it right in the first place, you may find that having someone to collate the information and fix up basic errors will produce a better result than waiting until the keywording is halfway through.

In terms of formatting, try to supply metadata in a spreadsheet, or better still in the IPTC fields of the images. This will make it easier to ingest the information into keywording software, and avoid being charged for extra admin time. Handwritten notes or unclear photocopies (even in PDF form) are bound to cause problems, so avoid whenever possible.

Keywording - The New Barrier to Entry

2010-10-02T15:23:00.001+13:00

Twenty years ago, setting up a stock or celebrity photo library meant a large investment in equipment - everything from transparency duplication equipment to filing cabinets - plus a web of sub-agents able to deliver physical imagery to customers around the world. With the advent of digital photography those physical barriers to entering the photo industry have all but disappeared, but today there is a new barrier: keywording.

As the number of images produced each week continues to grow, easy searchability is crucial. Without good keywording that can't be achieved. In general, keywording has become a prerequisite to entering the market, surviving in the market, and achieving market success

As the economy, and the economics of photo sales, have bitten hard in the past two years, it has become clear that the less successful libraries are finding it hard to keep up the necessary keywording standard.

For such libraries, or individual photographers, the compromises take a number of forms: inability to afford professional outsourced keywording, DIY keywording to a poor and inconsistent standard, confused roles within photo libraries which see salespeople and managers having to keyword (usually badly), restrictions on the number of images put into the market, long delays in getting images to market, and even total rejection of the need to keyword. This doesn't just affect small businesses. There are many large archives which aren't making the money they should because the job of keywording seems too insurmountable to even start.

The doom loop works like this: lack of profits leads to lack of money for keywording, leads to poor keywording, leads to poor sales, leads to lack of profits, and on it goes. Once caught in this trap, with only a few dollars made on each image it is easy to see why some photo libraries continue to struggle or decide to give up.

Here are some tips on how to beat the keywording trap:

1. Change the economics so keywording has a greater pay-off by making sure your images are likely to last in the market for as long a time as possible because they are timeless or classic or earn more money by being particularly hard to get/exclusive.
2. Get professional advice about how to lower keywording costs. Is inhouse keywording really cheaper? Can your keywording standard or selection of images for keywording be altered to lower costs without hurting sales?
3. Divert money from more flashy but less productive forms of marketing/sales into keywording. All the ads and sales calls in the world won't save your business if your customers (and research staff) can't find saleable images easily.

Don't Have a Cow About Keywording Sidecars

2010-09-17T17:11:00.000+12:00

XMP sidecar files present some curly problems for adding metadata, but with the right approach and the right software keywording can be straightforward.

Without going into too much techno-speak, the XMP sidecars hold all the information about an image such as keywords, caption and EXIF camera data, separately from the image they relate to. The idea is to leave the raw image file totally unaltered or damaged by adding in or changing the file with metadata. Adobe Lightroom uses this method of storing metadata for example.

The problem this presents to the keyworder is how to get a file which is easy to work with, showing both the image for reference purposes and any existing metadata that may be useful. Keyworders also need to be able to write back into that image so the metadata can be stored in IPTC and or copied to a spreadsheet. The sidecars themselves can be viewed with a simple text editor, but this is impractical not the least because they are so full of code it is hard to find what you are looking for.

The solution is to save the raw file as a jpeg, then import the metadata from the XMP sidecar into it and use that with standard keywording software or send it to a keywording company. There is an excellent free piece of software for importing XMP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExifTool

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

2010-08-22T18:25:00.018+12:00

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

2010-07-27T17:02:00.000+12:00

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?

2010-07-03T14:46:00.000+12:00

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

2010-06-19T12:20:00.000+12:00

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.

What Wine Can Teach Us About Ordering Keywording

2010-05-30T23:27:00.000+12:00

It is a continual source of puzzlement why so many photographers and image libraries are interested in purchasing "keywording". It sounds like an innocent enough request, but makes as much sense as going into a bar and ordering a glass of wine without specifying what colour, grape variety or label.

To take the wine analogy a little further, it wouldn't help that much to ask for just red wine, and even the grape variety alone might not make that much sense given that there are as many flavours of Chardonnay or Pino Noir as there are vineyards and vintages. In the same way, there are many ways of doing keywording such as being heavy on conceptual words, including technical terms, or referring to the composition of each image.

So to get the keywording you want from a new provider, think about how the wine drinker tries to get wine to their taste, by specifying the style, the flavours, the length of finish and so on. In other words, give as much detail as you can about what you expect with regards to the "flavour" of the keywording. Touch on aspects such as use of singulars or plurals, US-UK spellings, number of conceptual keywords, the appropriate keywording standard (eg Getty, Alamy or Corbis) and so on.

Better still, provide the keywording company with examples of what you already have and expect. It is an exercise in futility to keep this information back as some sort of blind test. Asking for a glass of red wine, and getting a Merlot when you really wanted a Pinot Noir, is hardly a good outcome for either side.

Right Keywords for the Audience - Why Search Data Isn't A Reliable Guide to What Keywords to Use

2010-05-21T14:01:00.000+12:00

There's a keywording adage "you can't buy what you can't find". A second saying needs to be added to that: "people don't search for what they don't find".

Many photo libraries spend time pawing over search statistics to find out what search terms their customers are using. If there are many searches using certain types of keywords - say words relating to composition or main colour - it is concluded that keywords reflecting those aspects of an image or video are important. Fair enough.

The mistake is believing the reverse is always true. If no one searches on say fashion descriptions on a celebrity site, these may not be important, but only if there are some keywords to find which researchers are ignoring. It is no use saying: "we don't add keywords relating to fashion because no one searches our site for them." The more likely scenario is that no one searches the site using fashion keywords because researchers long since gave up because there were no fashion keywords to find.

Imagine you owned a movie theatre which only screened horror movies, and audiences were dwindling. How sensible would it be to say that moviegoers didn't want any other type of movie because horror films were the only ones they ever turned up to see?

The best way to test that theory would be to offer some other sorts of movies, publicise the fact that a specialist horror movie house was now offering some different genres, and count the audiences that resulted.

Some good advice for photo libraries is not to have too much faith in search statistics. They only tell you how your customers are currently searching your site, and generally give few clues as to what needs improvement. You are better off spending time talking to your customers, observing what images and videos they use, then incorporating keywords to reflect those preferences.

But don't stop there. If you're suddenly adding a whole lot of different keywords, tell your customers about them, and make it easy to use on your site by having search mechanisms which suggest alternative keywords and ways of searching.

Russian Doll Keywording - Is a Hierarchical Vocabulary Really Worth It?

2010-04-27T16:56:00.000+12:00

Creating and amending a hierarchical vocabulary is par for the course in many keywording systems, but does storing keywords like a set of Russian dolls make keywording faster and more accurate?

Keywording in a hierarchy - Flora: Trees; Oak; Acorn, for instance - helps solve some important problems by making it clear by the relationships between each word, exactly what the meaning of each is. This solves, for instance, the difficulty of words spelled the same with different meanings, eg pool (the game) and pool (a body of water). So a hierarchical, controlled vocabulary adds precision and reduces confusion.

Controlled vocabularies have their roots in conventional library systems such as The Library of Congress. They are powerful tools, particularly in the hands of people with at least a modicum of training,

Because of the precision of meaning a hierarchical vocabulary gives, it lends itself to translation into different languages and refining of searching by displaying higher or lower parts of the hierarchy when searching.

Despite these advantages, there are some important questions to be addressed if thinking of using and maintaining such a system when keywording images or videos:

1. Portability - If keywords are attached to images in IPTC, and are carried around as they are distributed to sub-agents photo editors, advertising creatives and so on there is little chance those keywords will plug into an identical system belonging to the organisation/company receiving them. Indeed, once keywords are no longer linked to a database which knows that a particular instance of pool is linked to swimming and water rather than pool halls and cues, then the keywords have to fend for themselves. That's not to say that the keywords are pointless, but merely to suggest the full power of a controlled vocabulary is lost.

2. Flexibility - Because each new word added has to fit into an intricate structure, adding new words and terms is not straightforward. It is important that branches of the hierarchy do not overlap inappropriately, thus avoiding duplication of meaning which would destroy the point of the whole thing. This is a relatively easy thing to do when the vocabulary is small, but as the vocabulary get's bigger this can become a mammoth undertaking. Also, once a structure is in place,

3. Arbitrary Synonyms - As an intrinsic part of hierarchical vocabularies, the final word in the sequence (eg "Acorn", above) is normally given a relationship to words which are classed as synonyms. So for Acorn, synonyms might include "Nut" and "Seed". Of course deciding which words are the keywords and which are synonyms is essentially an arbitrary process based around the design principles of the particular vocabulary. When entering keywords it can be difficult to recall what is the keyword you must enter unless the synonyms are automatically available for selection also.

3. Time - Creating a controlled vocabulary in the first place is a huge task. A structure has to be maintained, so decisions need to be made about what is appropriate to go where. The process of maintaining the integrity of the system can therefore be extremely time-consuming. We have heard of some clients with hierarchical vocabularies who complain that maintaining the vocabulary takes far longer than keywording itself. Meanwhile adding keywords using an inflexible structure can greatly add to the inputting time, particularly when a keyword needs to be added which is not in the structure. Parallel systems for handling these new words adds to the complexity of the process, and the time it takes.

4. Cost - Creating, maintaining and inputting keywords with a hierarchical structure takes extra time, and inevitably the labour costs go up. To get the maximum return from the hierarchical system, libraries may also find themselves locked into using expensive keywording databases and systems.

5. Searchability - Ironically, hierarchical systems can produce inferior keywords because there is less freedom to add in words which don't fit into the system.

There are alternatives to hierarchical keywording, in particular using word strings or word swarms in which keywords are added and selected because of usefulness and relevance, rather because they are part of a hierarchy.

So a string for "Swimming Pool" would include synonyms, plus related keywords such as "Exercise". Should a new, useful keyword be needed, it is simply added into the string. This avoids adding numerous hierarchical keywords which are largely there as placeholders for the system, thus making it easier to get to the essence of the image or video in question. Overlapping of keywords is also not a problem, thus making vocabulary maintenance quick and inexpensive.

Selection of keywords is fast, as the various strings, including synonyms, can be exposed, and the most relevant selected from various options. Because similar images and videos tend to get keyworded over and over, strings can be made better and more relevant by experience.

Even hierarchical vocabularies can be put into such strings, so conversion to this method can be a relatively easy process.

5 Ways to Slash Your Real Keywording Costs

2010-04-11T18:12:00.000+12:00

There is hardly a photo library in the world which isn't looking to cut costs. One of the first things to come under scrutiny is the cost of keywording. We've come up with 5 tips on how to change what you're doing with your keywording and save money.

In doing so, we've looked at the real cost of keywording, which includes not only the direct labour component of getting keywording done, but also the costs of waiting to put images/videos on the market or missing out on sales because of poor keywording.

1. Switch From do-it-yourself to outsourced keywording - It's rare that libraries do a full analysis of how much doing their own keywording really costs. Often the amount is under-estimated because the costs of training, administration, rent and equipment are not included. The other mistake is to fail to calculate the amount of time wasted when keywording volumes are low and staff are deployed on other tasks which may, or may not be worthwhile doing. For individual photographers/videographers the biggest cost is in taking themselves away from the more productive/creative part of their work which they are experts in, and can earn more money from. For more information on how to calculate the cost of inhouse keywording - Click Here

2. Keyword earlier - Delays in getting images to market is a loser money-wise because you will inevitably lose out on sales while you are waiting to make your images available to customers. You may also find yourself with increased administration costs as you try to organise and recruit people to do the extra work to cope with the rush which is causing the delays.

3. Match keywording capacity with image/video flow - Short of outsourcing, you can keep down-time of staff to a minimum when there is little work, and delays getting images/videos to market when there is lots of work, by better planning when you will receive images and videos. You will probably need to look at employing part-time or casual staff to give you the flexibility you need, and liaising more closely with the photographers/videographers supplying you.

4. Do it once, do it right - We are often approached by companies who need help with their keywording because first time around they did a bad job. Sadly, it is normally cheaper and better to simply redo the keywords from scratch. So the initial effort is wasted completely. The moral of the story: No one ever regrets buying quality, and the same goes with keywording.

5. Avoid snail-pace software - There are numerous systems and software packages you can use to keyword. Many are cumbersome and end up costing you money by making images and video slow to process. Make sure any software is designed for speed, which means it should be simple to use, be flexible in which vocabularies it can utilise, and should not be built around lengthy dropdown lists of keywords which are notoriously slow to select from. We'd also recommend not keywording across the internet with a browser or any software which restricts you to adding keywords only one image/video at a time.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Wide Variation in Keywording on Fotosearch Site

2010-03-19T18:12:00.001+13:00

Keywording spam, under-keywording, inaccurate keywords, misspelling and inconsistency have been highlighted in a survey of keywording found on image portal Fotosearch.

The survey, conducted by keywording company Keedup, returned a wide spread of results with scores of 93 out of 100, to as low as 29 amongst the 21 rights-managed photo libraries represented on the Fotosearch site. The average score was 68.

"There was some really excellent keywording - clear, relevant and accurate - but other keywording was well below par," said Keedup's Stock Keywording Manager, Jess Wilson.

As the contributing libraries used their own metadata, this was not a reflection on Fotosearch itself, but on the wide variation in quality between the libraries.

"Considering that the success of any librarie's images on a site like this is dependent on their images being found before those of their rivals, poor keywording amounts to taking a knife to a gunfight. Libraries with good keywording will inevitably do better, at the expense of their rivals. It's as simple as that."

The keedup survey was a qualitative assessment of the keywords, looking at such factors as spelling errors, consistency, whether the keywording included extraneous detail, or left out vital information.

"What we hadn't been prepared for was how many inaccurate and just plain strange some keywording was," Miss Wilson said.

One example was a set of keywords for a picture of an old woman leaning on her hand, close up from chin to forehead.

The keywords included were:
‘accomodation, annuity insurance, bench, boarding-house, calm, care, dementia, granny, hands, health, health insurance, home, need care, older, park, park bench, pelt, pension, rest, seniors, silence, sitting, skin, support, weakness, age’

"It's hard to see the park bench, or a pelt. Whilst the woman might be at home, using the keyword 'home' is hardly relevant. And although she might be sitting, you can't actually tell. Was she in a boarding house? Who knows. There were other obvious words that could have been put in that weren't, such as 'elderly' or 'woman'."

For more information about the survey results, email keedupinfo@keedup.com

Inhouse vs Outsourced - Now You Can Work Out Which is Cheaper Using the Keywordingcentral Calculator

2010-03-12T17:32:00.001+13:00

Inhouse keywording is the preference of many image and video libraries. But how many companies preferring to do their own keywording have an accurate idea of the cost? Keywording Central has created a calculator to help answer the question of which is cheaper - inhouse or outsourced?

To get a copy of the calculator, just send a request here: contributions@keywordingcentral.com.

Once you've got the calculator, all you have to do is fill in the yellow spaces with information about keyworders' pay rates, the number of days holiday and so forth. The calculator does the rest.

Almost everyone under-estimates the cost of inhouse keywording, so this is an attempt to include as many of the hidden costs as possible - things like rent and health insurance. Even so, this will undoubtedly still not include some amounts, as the calculator has focused on the most important ones. If necessary, the rent figure can be loaded up to include other overheads.

One important factor which is included - in a separate spreadsheet linked to the main calculator - is the cost of delaying getting images and videos on the market. This is often a massive cost - way more than the cost of keywording itself - yet many photo libraries will hang on to images for weeks if not months waiting until the staff get around to doing the work. The long and short of it is that time is money, and that cost needs to be taken into account when opting not to outsource.

Capel on Keywording - Alamy Sheds Light on its Keywording Philosophy

2010-03-05T11:34:00.001+13:00

Alamy Images' Head of Content, Alan Capel, gives some insights into the business of keywording and how Alamy structures its metadata.

Keywording, keywording...just how mind-blowingly, soul destroying an activity can this be? This is what I usually hear when I talk to Photographers about keywording.

Many of these photographers remember the days when all they had to worry about was getting the right shot and getting the slides off to the library. Words associated with images was the responsibility of the agency. You could help by captioning the images but that would probably stretch to the location of the shoot and cursory description of the content. I often had to work with a landscape, a rough idea of where the photographer had been and an awful lot of travel guides to try to correctly describe the image in hand. I still amaze people by recognizing obscure monuments from around the world, my friends think I’m such a well travelled person but the experiences were 100% vicarious.

As we all know, times have changed and in tandem with the brave new world of digital imagery came the need for comprehensive and insightful keywording.

It used to be all about the image but now it’s all about the image and the ability to describe and contextualize it.

Some photographers abdicate this responsibility to keywording companies, others choose to do it themselves. As one gnarled veteran photographer told me, “yes I do my own keywording but I have to buy a bottle of gin to get me through it!” I’d imagine his keywording starts off quite relevant and then probably ventures into the realms of surreal and ends up downright obscure! So I’m not advocating alcoholic assistance but help is at hand.

a number of keywording companies offer specialist keywording services whereby they will keyword your images for you. You do need to provide basic caption info but they will do the rest. They will not only cover the literal aspect of your image - is it daylight, is there a tree in it? But also what emotions and concepts does the image evoke? These are fundamentals that are vital if you are looking to catch the eye of the creative image buyer.

Other companies have developed keywording software where you can continue to do the work yourself but semantic networks and hierarchical keyword structures lighten the mental load. In the long run they are probably cheaper than the gin option and certainly better for your general well being.

At Alamy www.alamy.com we have an ever-growing, diverse collection and it very quickly became clear that just having a single keyword field meant was not going to be sustainable. It was no help to customers when a search for ‘dog’ returned a dog head shot found on the same page as an image in which the dog is miles away, obscured in the background.

I’d long been an advocate of having something called ‘super keywords’. I could usually look at an image and sum up its principle relevant search terms in a matter of a few words. The rest was padding, albeit often important padding to further contextualize the image.

So at Alamy we introduced three fields . The essential keywords field is only 50 characters long and this is where you put your crown jewels in terms of the key words. The most important terms go in here. If the image shouts ‘freedom’ make sure it’s an essential keyword. If the image is of a couple arguing it’s about ‘relationships’,’arguments’ and ‘stress’ and it’s probably very little about the colour of the model’s hair or the fact that they are sitting in a garden. That’s why keywords are key words.

We then have two further tiers. The main keywords field gives you 300 characters to play with and you can usually exhaust the most relevant terms by using this field. Finally there is the comprehensive keywords field which you may well use if you are generating synonyms of your preferred terms. Remember, even though a hierarchical tree with a semantic network of synonyms ‘tells’ you that ‘autonomy’ means the same as ‘freedom’ which of these two words will a searcher use when looking for images to promote adventure holidays? Cue booming voice… “experience the autonomy with Adventurehols..” I don’t think so. So please check any auto-keywording for relevancy.

If the word the customer is searching for is in your essential keywords field you will appear higher up the search results than images where the words appear in either the main or the comprehensive fields. This is supposing all other factors are equal. On Alamy the performance of your images over time also has an impact, plus some other factors that I’m afraid have to remain a mystery. One important fact is that if your images come up for searches and are ignore by buyers - maybe the dog is too far in the distance - well that will be detrimental to your success on the long run. So on Alamy bad keywording not only disappoints the customer, in time it will have a negative impact on the photographers’ fortunes too. It is essential to get it right.

So keywording is essential, and on Alamy the essential keywords field is exactly that..essential. It’s the way in which you can promote the primary reasons why you took the image and hopefully the primary reasons why it will be bought,

Good Luck, keep off the gin and learn to love words as much as the images themselves (well almost as much).

Using a Thesaurus to Create a Vocabulary - a Monster of a Problem

2010-02-20T12:57:00.001+13:00

Generating synonyms is a big part of creating a good vocabulary, but if you think using a thesaurus - or building one into your keywording software - is a quick and thorough answer, think again.

The basic problem is that many words which are proposed as synonyms are pointless, misleading or undesirable, if left unedited

Consider, for instance a simple word such as bicycle. A major thesaurus generated these synonyms for that word:

bike, cycle, tandem, two-wheeler, velocipede, wheels.

Just loooking through this string there are obvious difficulties. A "tandem" is a bicycle built for two, but someone searching for an image of a tandem would not to be pleased to see many images of bicycles with only one person aboard. The word "wheels" seems an odd choice as it is not in itself a strict synonym. "Velocipede" is okay, although there wouldn't be many people searching with that word.

Much bigger headaches start with more conceptual terms such as "romantic". Here are the thesaurus-generated synonyms we got for that:

amative, amatory, aphrodisiac, ardent, attached, boy crazy, doting, enamored, erotic, fond, girl crazy, have a crush on, horny, hot, hot and heavy,impassioned, in love, infatuated, lovesick, lovey dovey, lustful, passionate, romantic, sexy, sweet for, sweet on, tender, turned on

Imagine the image is of a couple in their 70s having a tender, loving kiss on a beach. Now that's romantic, but do you think that "girl crazy", "aphrodisiac" or "sexy" really capture the meaning and essence of that shot? The problem is that words such as "romantic" have many different shades of meaning, some of which can be conflicting. If this issue is not addressed, the value of keywording is severely weakened.

Sad to say, as we look at keywording around various sites we find a lot of these curious and problematic "synonyms" that have not been edited when the vocabulary was first created, or at the time keywords were entered. You have to suspect that this is due to either laziness or a lack of understanding of the English language, or both.

If developing your own vocabulary, we suggest you edit all entries for the precise shade of meaning before adding them to the vocabulary.

Alternatively you can rely on excellent keywording staff to edit down these words during entry. However, this does require a high standard of English knowledge.

For companies which just automatically load an electronic thesaurus into their software and take whatever words are generated, all we can say is that you should examine whether you aren't short-changing your customers.

The 90% Rule - Keeping Keywords Relevant

2010-01-23T12:33:00.000+13:00

How do you decide which keywords are appropriate? Should you include every conceivable word which might be relevant to an image or video, or should you try to keep the number of keywords to a bare minimum? The answer is the 90% rule.

When undertaking keywording, there is a sure way to unwanted cost and a little madness: try to create the perfect set of keywords. Apart from the impossibility of attaining perfection itself, the process of trying to reach that goal is normally extremely time consuming as well as pointless.

Instead, attempt to reach a 90% confidence level for each keyword and for the set as a whole. This is not a scientifically-measurable percentage, but more an acknowledgement that taking the acceptable level back from perfection is an acceptable and attainable result.

So the aim of the exercise is to save time, but also to stop the number of keywords becoming so enormous, and the keywords so tenuous, that you can find virtually every image by using virtually any keyword. The more focused on the essence of the image/video the keywords are, the more effective research will be.

When an archive is small, this problem may seem non-existent, but for companies such as Getty Images, with enormous archives, neglecting this problem is extremely commercially damaging as research will drag in thousands of irrelevant images.

Consider this application of the 90% rule: In a picture of a couple kissing, you can justifiably argue that a keyword such as "romance" would be expected by 90% of researchers. Now take a picture of a couple holding hands and walking down the street with shopping bags in their hand, looking a bit glum. Some people might think that because the couple are holding hands that the word "romance" is still appropriate. But it can be argued that at least 90% of researchers would be disappointed to find such an image with that keyword. By the same token, at least 90% of researchers would be happy to find that image with the keyword "shopping".

It is not that this confidence level will find the right image every time, more that it will stop irrelevant padded-out search results.

Likewise, if the number of keywords is too small you are short changing researchers. In that case, consider if there is another word you can add which 90% of researchers would be happy to use. So if the word shopping was not used in our example that would be poor keywording as more than 90% of researchers would be likely to expect it.

As mentioned, this is not a matter of science, more of judgment, but it can help you focus you efforts on getting an appropriate set of keywords.

One caveat though is that keywords destined for third parties such as Getty Images, Corbis or Alamy, should always be 100% in compliance with their standards and conventions.

Clinging to Bad Keywording

2010-01-16T11:44:00.000+13:00

Good keywording can transform the searchability of an archive, yet many photo and video libraries and on-line sellers continue to cling to poor keywording as if anything will do.

The level of self-delusion can be dumfounding. A colleague told me of a recent conversation with an on-line seller who was using product descriptions as keywords. As you might expect, the descriptions often contained misleading and superfluous words, with little consistency from one product to another due to the fact that the descriptions were written by countless different buyers and merchandisers.

Search results were all over the place, with customers frequently not seeing all the relevant products or having to wade through numerous irrelevant results to find what they were looking for.

Superficially, this was acknowledged, but the person in charge of the web site was more concerned with the look of the site, the search engine software, and many other "sexier" projects. Good keywording would have to wait at least six months. If it happens even in a year, it will be a surprise.

Ignoring keywording in favour of look and feel is like deciding you can change your luck when going fishing by getting a new boat, fishing rod and reel, but continuing to use the wrong bait.

This example illustrates one reason why people stick with bad keywording: they're too busy doing other things which are more interesting.

Whilst publicly-available statistics and studies are hard to come by, there is a simple test for people running such sites to see what the value is of putting some energy into keywording rather than changing the look of that banner, or changing ultra-expensive search software. All they need to do is some mystery shopping on their own site. They can try various product searches, and look for things such as gifts, products for kids, products by colours and so on, and see how they get on. It normally takes only a few minutes to work out there's a problem that needs addressing.

The second reason for sticking with bad keywording is that some people see metadata as a problem too big to even begin to tackle. This is especially true for editorial libraires where the quantity of images is a constant difficulty.

When faced with an avalanche of pictures and videos coming in every week, it is understandable that attention is given to just keeping up. In that case, keywording by photographers, or very sparse keywording, is the order of the day. Often captions are relied upon alone. Which all means that the archive being built will become increasingly hard to search with little depth of search terms, misleading keywords and little consistency. Ironically, keywording could fix those problems, the very thing libraries feel they don't have the time and resources to do because they're too busy getting the images out to the world.

One solution to this dilemma is to simply cut down on the images or video by putting restrictions on the numbers being submitted, or by editing submissions more strictly. With so many images in particular being similar, reducing supply can improve the variety of images that come up in searches and make a more attractive lightbox for customers to view. Indeed all functions of a library can improve if there are fewer images and videos to work with.

Meanwhile, timing problems can be addressed by careful outsourcing to a 24/7 keywording company atuned to fast workflow.

The other main reason for clinging to bad keywording is that people fear change - including potentially changing staffing. Changes in systems and keywording can also be an admission that previous policies were a mistake.

At this point, CEOs and managers of libraries need to have an objective look at what is going on. Keywording managers and other staff may be too invested in the past to see that there can be a better way of doing things. Again, outsourcing can help address this problem, even if that means simply employing outside consultants to help reorganise the inhouse keywording.

Vocabulary - The Never Ending Story

2010-01-09T12:41:00.001+13:00

The cornerstone of any consistent keywording system is an excellent vocabulary. Investing time and energy into creating one is vital.

It is possible - in fact much amateur keywording is carried out this way - to simply look at an image or video and decide what seem like worthwhile words to include. A template of keyword topics such as appearance, concepts and so on can help this.

But that is a long way short of an organised vocabulary with structure. And it makes it very difficult to sustain the sort of consistency which will allow researchers to know that when they write in the word "business" that only business images will be returned, and that all business images will be returned.

An organised vocabulary also means that synonyms can be included very easily by linking them together in word strings. Other organisation patterns, such as word hierarchies going from the specific to the general - eg hibiscus,-flowering plant,-plant, flora - can also be employed. Although it creating such complex and rigid patterns it is important to realise that speed of amending and improving a vocabulary will be compromised, as will fast inputting.

One thing is for sure - any keywording vocabulary will fall well short of all the words necessary to keyword every image or video in existence. The Oxford Dictionary contains more than 600,000 words, with about 2,500 being added every three months. Just keeping up with those words is difficult enough, but there are literally millions of proper nouns, names of species, people's names, brands, slang words and so on.

More complex vocabularies also contain compound terms and phrases such as "beauty in nature". Once the combinations of synonyms and so on are in the mix, possible keywords and keyword strings which could find their way into a vocabulary are essentially endless.

So the idea that a vocabulary is set in stone, or that the job of creating one is ever finished, is simply an illusion.

If creating your own vocabulary then, there are four important factors to bear in mind:

1. Structure - Will you use a hierarchy, a simple word list, or word strings?

2. Depth - How far will you go in terms of levels of synonyms, numbers of words and so on? Every vocabulary is a compromise, so it's important to decide what that compromise will be. In the case of specialist archives these decisions may be easier as there are fewer words to deal with, but a general vocabulary is harder nut to crack.

3. Ease of Updating - Every good vocabulary is altered, improved and added to on a regular basis. If it is tricky to make changes, this maintenance can become an intolerable burden.

4. Ease of Use - All the words in the world are of little use if it is difficult to find them and add them to the keywords field. So think carefully about how your vocabulary fits with your input software and vice versa. It may be a case that it is more efficient for you to change your inputting methods than your vocabulary.

Finally, when constructing a vocabulary, try to keep the end use in mind. Highly-structured vocabularies that a librarian might use are unlikely to work for databases being searched by members of the public who need a more intuitive system.

Is Your Company Big Enough to Do Its Own Keywording?

2009-12-17T17:21:00.002+13:00

Successful inhouse keywording relies on maintaining a level of expertise which allows for efficient use of resources and a consistent, high standard of work. Too often, photographers and small photo libraries attempt to save money by doing it themselves, but run into problems. So how do you know if your company is big enough to do keywording successfully?

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself to find out if you've got enough manpower and expertise to keyword well for the long haul:

1. If one or two of your keyworders didn't come in to work, would keywording halt or be severely curtailed? - If the answer's "yes" then you don't have the staff to maintain the level of efficiency you need. Illness is one thing, but staff also resign, have babies, go on holiday and die. With only a tiny number of staff, all the expertise they've built up is of no use when they aren't around.

Biting off more than you can chew with keywording?

2. If the person doing your training of keyworders was to get another job, do you have someone who can seamlessly move into the role? - Even if you have a reasonable number of keyworders, if there is a revolving door of talent, with only one expert in the room, you are vulnerable That person can cripple your keywording effort by leaving, and will be very difficult to replace.

3. Do you have your keywording processes fully documented? - If that's something you've always been meaning to do, but never got around to, then keywording just isn't enough of a priority for you to do it well. If it was a priority, or you had sufficient resources committed to it, documentation would have been done long ago.

4. Do your keyworders do duties other than keywording, or have periods when they have little keywording to do? - If so, this means you have either compromised on quality by getting a Jack-of-all-trades to do your keywording, or you're wasting money having keyworders twiddling their thumbs.

5. Does the quality of your keywording vary considerably depending on who is doing the keywording? - If that's the case then your systems are not adequate to maintain the level of consistency necessary for good keywording. That's probably because it's not a focus of your business.

6. Do you know how much it costs per image to do your keywording, including admin, training and other overheads? - If you can't lay your hands on this figure immediately then you're spending money blindly and almost certainly are paying too much for your keywording because you don't have the economies of scale to make it worthwhile to work out the costs properly.

7. Are you regularly updating your keywording standards and software? - If you're not updating this information often, and use the same software all the time, you're almost certainly behind the eight ball compared to professional keyworders or your competitors.

8. Are you sick of having to take time out from management or sales to supervise, train or recruit for your inhouse keywording? - If you've got better things to do, then why are you getting involved in keywording? There's only one answer.

9. Do you find yourself having to significantly delay getting images or video to market while you wait for keywording to be done? - Every day your images or videos remain unkeyworded and off the market is a day you miss out on revenue. If you are having to make this compromise on a regular basis, your company is too small to do inhouse keywording.

10. Do you have a keywording vocabulary which is regularly maintained and refined? - Without a decent vocabulary which is well-maintained you are unlikely to maintain a consistent standard of keywording. This takes a lot of effort and organisation. Understandably, photographers and small libraries often have other priorities, but that doesn't make for good keywording.

Getting Short Changed With Your Keywording Standard?

2009-12-12T20:44:00.000+13:00

Ask three keywording companies for Getty or Alamy keywording, or keywording appropriate for your own web site, and you're guaranteed to get three very different results.

A client of ours recently shopped around some of the biggest names in keywording to see just how standards differed. Although asking for exactly the same keywording "standards" from each company, they found remarkable differences in what was offered under the same banner.

The areas they found the most variance in were (in order of importance):

1. Specificity of keywords - Some companies delivered keywords which were too general, and did not capture the essence of each image. Getting to grips with what makes an image special is what delivers the strongest search results.

2. Over-keywording - Call it keywording spam if you want to be more brutal. Some of the companies just didn't know when to stop, seeing all sorts of possibilities in the images which rendered the keywording less effective, not more.

3. Poor conceptual keywording - The ability to include appropriate concepts such as victory, beauty in nature or romance, is crucial for images or video to be found and sold. Deep knowledge of English is needed to get the best results, and it showed.

4. Confused presentation - One company in particular provided keywords in such a bewildering array of lists of synonyms, which seemed to overlap, that it was hard to understand what it all meant.

As a general rule, the more money you pay for your keywording the less likely you are to find inadequacies in these areas. Excellent English language skills of the keyworders are vital.

It is best in every case to shop around and get samples done to your specific requirements. Take the time to make sure the company knows what those are. It is a good sign if you are able to get into a dialogue with the keywording company and find out what they understand by the particular standard required.

Piksee Software Speeds Live Image Workflow

2009-12-04T12:08:00.002+13:00

News and celebrity photo agencies will soon have a time-efficient way to add keywording to their live image production, thanks to the advent of Piksee workflow software.

By taking a fresh approach to the problem of organising and processing image sets, Piksee - developed by Keedup - can handle large volumes of pictures with minimal loss of time, whilst also reducing internet data traffic by 90%.

Where news and celebrity images once went out to clients and sub-agents with hardly any metadata, there is now the opportunity to get the information into the IPTC fields of the images from the beginning.

The breakthrough with Piksee is that it allows keywords to be added to high-resolution images without them having to leave our clients’ servers. Previously the only way to keyword images where they stood, was by using a VPN or browser system, normally one image at a time which is extremely slow.

Piksee in operation at Keedup's Auckland office

To do the keywording itself, it is far faster to use Keedup's customised keywording systems, but that has meant having high-resolution images sent by FTP, and returned the same way. Piksee uses a system of sampling the high-res images and writing back only the tiny amount of actual metadata. It also avoids having to use clumsy and slow FTP.

Keedup developers studied the sort of production line principles used by companies such as Toyota so that image sets were “assembled” automatically and processed in an orderly fashion, syncing seamlessly with Keedup’s keywording software.

When they studied the workflow process they found time was being lost in numerous areas such as in the time it took for an FTP server to recognise an image was ready to be sent. Plus when large numbers of images were being transmitted, sets of images often took too long to be received because part of the set was stuck way back in the queue.

Piksee has been written in Java to operate with Mac and PC, and the emphasis is on versatility and simplicity. It can be installed and operated with minimum of fuss. If the keywording software were to be changed or updated, Piksee would work with that. No complicated database or software is needed at the client end.

Everything is controlled by Keedup's Image-Eye Server which is similar to the All Seeing Eye software used by gaming companies to allow players to interact from anywhere in the world. So distance is not a barrier to speed.

This also means it is easy for Piksee to be plugged into existing client workflows, something that photo agencies are very concerned about.

Beyond the speed and efficiency gains, Piksee gives clients an easy way to monitor progress with their own client window, and allows detailed performance monitoring by Keedup staff.

Piksee has taken a year to write and test, and is already being deployed for one of Keedup’s major clients.

For more information, contact Kevin Townsend kevint@keedup.com

Keywording Standards? Nobody Knows

2009-11-28T12:14:00.000+13:00

So what is the industry standard for keywording? When that question is raised, the appropriate answer is - in the words of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple - "nobody knows".

Due to it's unregulated do-it-yourself nature, keywording standards have developed to meet the needs of the particular photo or video libraries concerned, rather than as part of an industry-wide standard.

The result is some front runners (notably the so-called Getty standard), but many, many other standards with different sorts of rules and controlled vocabularies, or no set vocabularies at all.

Agatha Christie's Miss Marple - "nobody knows"

Whilst the Getty Images standard has much to recommend it - particularly its emphasis on including only the most pertinent terms - the original keywording submitted by photographers and photo libraries (often with the help of professional keywording contractors) is designed primarily to fit into the Getty system - being absorbed into a much larger vocabulary. The result is the inclusion of some slightly peculiar terms such as human hand and full suit (jacket and pants). This keywording is therefore not ideally suited to normal intuitive searching by ordinary people more used to looking for hands and suits.

Outside of Getty, there are numerous standards such as for Alamy and Corbis. The irksome thing is that the difference between these standards is often stylistic rather than substantive. For instance, ages and ethnicities are often referred to with different terms which essentially mean the same thing, but are unacceptable to other companies. Some keywording standards involve multiple fields containing keywords, whilst most only have one - more complication.

Cynical observers might think that this is an attempt by the large photo libraries to make it difficult for images to be offered to competitors, by making it expensive to re-keyword images to submit in alternative keywording styles.

More likely, it is simply a case of no regulatory body and the historical rise and fall of various players in the market and with them their particular ideas about keywording.

Ironically, given that keywording is so un-standardised, people often have strong views about what constitues good keywording. We recently had a client ask for keywording to an "impressive standard" - and who wouldn't want that. The only problem is that no such standard exists, and if you asked two people in the photo business to define it, they wouldn't come up with the same answer even if they could actually define a standard.

In amongst all this is an ongoing battle between two major camps: those who believe less is more (eg Getty) and those who believe more is more. So the same set of keywords can be praised for being inadequate because they are over-keyworded with too many words of minor relevance, or not keyworded enough because the keywords do not include every single possible word that might be associated with the image.

The easiest way to view a standard is a set of rules setting out the constraints and prescriptions for how keywording should be entered. These rules include such imperatives as "no plurals", or "only use verbs in present tense continuous" (running as opposed to run). They may even go so far as to tell you exactly what words you can use - a controlled vocabulary. Any words not in the vocabulary are not permitted.

Controlled vocabularies give a lot of consistency, but run into a major problem - language is a moving and growing target. Words that are in common usage are changing all the time, whilst new words enter the language every day. These new words are not necessarily slang or common words, more likely they are things such as place names, people's names, brands and other proper nouns. Even sheer size of the language is a problem. Whilst the contents of the Oxford dictionary might be considered "the English language", it is only a fraction of all the words available when you add in those place names, species and so on.

In attempting to make sense of such a difficult thing as language, keywording companies sometimes talk (with religious zeal in some cases) about keywords and synonyms as if there is a set of "main" words, and then their synonyms. This is obviously nonsensical to anyone with high school English. Two words such as "pants" and "trousers" are synonyms of each other, but deciding one is the primary word is totally arbitrary.

In getting advice about keywording, or picking a contractor to do your keywording, be wary of people who try to tell you there is an industry standard to which they adhere - this is just a sales ploy. Likewise, be worried about people talking about keywords and synonyms - this is more hocus pocus.

Whilst it goes against the grain in some ways, a keywording company which has an honest appraisal of the uncertainties of keywording is far more likely to do a good job than one which tells you it will meet the industry standard (the one that doesn't exist). One way tounderstand what sort of company you are dealing with is to ask them if there is an industry standard or get them to explain how they deal with the expanding language. The more ready they are to work with you to fit the sort of style you want, the more likely they are to give you what you want. If they have developed their own standards and vocabularies that is a good sign as it shows at least the company realises that standards ar not set in stone, and have doen the hard yards producing a standard of their own.

Photographers and Small Libraries Get Drafted Into Searchability War

2009-11-14T13:01:00.001+13:00

Whether they like it or not, photographers and small photo libraries are being drafted into the searchability war, where images have to compete on huge aggregating sites like Alamy, Getty, LicenseStream and Fotosearch. So don't go into battle armed with a pee shooter.

The war is fought photographer on photographer, library on library. More specifically it occurs in situations where metadata is not the responsibility of the aggregating site, but rather the responsibility of the photographer or small library.

Battles are fought primarily with keywording, and can be a brutal affair. If you have poor keywords, or ones which are not in sync with the requirements of the aggregator, your images will be beaten out by others who have spent the time and money to arm their images with the best possible keywords.

It leaves many photographers in a difficult position where they have to suddenly become more than a photographer. They need to be image management, and keywording specialists.

The biggest mistake in this war is to go lightly armed. Competitors who spend the time and money on high quality keywording will tend to win, over and over again. The money saved skimping on keywording will become rather cold comfort when sales success isn't what it should be.

We have spoken to many photographers who have shown us their keywording, confident that it was good enough. The fact of the matter is that the keywording wasn’t even close to adequate. With the number of competing photographers with some appropriate metadata, the badly keyworded images may as well have not been on line at all.

One needs only to log onto www.fotosearch.com to see the variety of keywording styles from its contributors and the kind of results that appear when the contributor hasn’t quite got it right.

Photographers and small photo libraries need not surrender however, the keywording can be taken care of by experts without costing the earth. If it is the industry protocol that photographers must look after the success of their images on these sites alone, then it is crucial they are equipped with the best help on the market.

Warning, Dangerous Keywords

2009-11-06T07:24:00.001+13:00

Extreme keywording is unlikely to make it into the next X Games, but make no mistake, when keywording editorial/celebrity images and video it can be dangerous.

In particular, it is possible to defame real people when keywords, or captions, suggest impropriety or criminality.

For instance, in the drive to make images seem more sensational, it is tempting to suggest a celebrity is drunk, out of it, or even squiffy. As a client mentioned to us recently "unless you've got a blood test you don't know if someone is drunk or drugged". We couldn't agree more.

Romance is another area fraught with difficulty. Suggesting a married man is with a girlfriend could have repercussions for his marriage, and land you with a law suit.

Even when not trying, you can inadvertently suggest immoral activity. We once saw a caption from a photographer which suggested that a world famous singer was a paedophile by saying he took a 13-year-old girl up to his room and they seemed to be "very good friends".

Even if keywords aren't defamatory, they can still cause upset. Keywords such as fat and obese might be accurate, but could be considered offensive. This is a judgement call of course. Sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade.

Obscenities and swear words are also best avoided insofar as they are in bad taste and seem unprofessional.

The best way to avoid dangerous metadata is to have images and videos keyworded professionally, or at the very least give photographers/videographers very clear guidelines of what is and isn't allowed. A good rule of thumb is to imagine what you might think if you you were in the picture and read the keywords or caption. If you think you'd be reaching for the telephone to call your lawyers, then there may well be a problem.

Seven Deadly Sins of Keywording

2009-10-31T00:22:00.000+13:00

Judging the standard of keywording is a tricky business. Here are seven of the worst mistakes that can be made. How does you keywording measure up?

1. More is Less - Many people measure keywording by size (number of keywords), not quality. The result is a lot of misleading keywords which produce cluttered and irrelevant results when clients search your image or video library. The more relevant the words, the better. Going crazy on the number of keywords is unlikely to produce that result.

2. Seen One, Seen em All - If the keywords in image after image have a familiar look, it's probably because they have been keyworded in a very general, nondescript way. No matter how relevant or accurate the keywords, if there is little to distinguish one image from another, their value is limited.

3. Hard Errors - If the image is of a banana but the keywords say apple, if the video shows a businessperson but the keyword says sportsman, misleading search results are inevitable. Hard errors are a cardinal sin.

4. Just Plain Weird - Occasionally, keywording will seem so incongruous that you wonder if it was meant to be done that way. Check the obvious things. Was it the right standard? Was the right keywording supplied for the right images or videos?

5. The Phantom of the Keywording - Including references to people or places not visible in an image or video are tempting, but are ultimately misleading. Such phantom keywords should not be included except in exceptional circumstances.

6. A Bad Spell - Spelling mistakes are the most elementary of errors. Be particularly concerned if the same word is misspelled in more than one image or video. This may indicate a systemic problem such as with the keywording vocabulary being used.

7. Inaccurate Conception - Conceptual keywords are powerful tools to aid searchability. However, it's important that the right concepts are used. By their very nature concepts often involve subtle shades of meaning. If you find concepts being addded which don't seem to fit, then the keyworders' basic competence or familiarity with the language may be in question.

Need the (Metadata) Info

2009-10-24T11:43:00.000+13:00

Getting the keywording you need without communicating what those needs are can be very problematic, if not impossible. As Dr Evil says in the movie Austin Powers: "need the info" - he could have been talking about keywording.

Making your keywording experience a success is a two way process. Metadata companies must bring their expertise and knowledge of keywording standards, processes, vocabularies and so on. But that expertise is wasted if the client doesn't play their part.

If you begin talking to a keywording company and feel they either aren't prepared to change or modify what they will deliver for you, or they have a one-size-fits-all attidude you may well be best off going elsewhere. No matter how low the price, if the keywording doesn't fit your needs it's a waste of money.

From the client's side, try your best to give good quality information, and try to avoid constantly changing your mind. Discuss everything with the keywording provider first so the parameters are clear.

Always get samples done before proceeding and make adjustments to your requirements at that stage. Don't be afraid to ask for a few sets of samples if things aren't working out properly. The best keywording providers will work with you on this.

Here are some things you will need to discuss with your keywording provider:

1. Who you are submitting to, if anyone - Where you images or video are going makes a big difference. Obviously if submitting to Getty you will need the Getty standard. If for Alamy or Corbis then the keywording needs to meet their standards.

2. What your own keywording needs are - A Getty or Alamy standard probably aren't appropriate for your own web site. Be wary of companies that tell you otherwise without offering an alternative standard. Spend time understanding exactly what vocabulary and so on will be used in your case. Lack of flexibility or knowledge are bad signs.

3. How specialised your images/videos are - If you have a particular and narrow speciality you need to let the company know how specialised the keywording needs to be. Are Latin names required, technical terms and so on. It is unlikely that a keywording firm has people with experience in every field of endeavour, so you are likely to have to talk over how those terms will be incorporated in the keywording vocabulary, or will be researched as needed via the internet.

4. What metadata you will provide - This is often glossed over. You need to be crystal clear about how much information you can supply, particular regarding proper nouns such as place names, names of objects and people. Never, ever presume that the keywording provider can work out this information by research. An image of a white bird with long legs and a large wingspan could be any number of species. Don't leave it to keyworders to guess. You will be very unhappy with the mistakes that are made, or the lack of detail in the keywords. With captions, make sure they are written in proper sentences so it is clear what each thing is. Don't use a bullet-point style where there is room for error.

5. What model release information you will provide - This is crucial for keywording images or videos of people for the likes of Getty. Be very clear whether this information is needed, and what the precise details are.

6. The who what and how, all those annoying little details - How many images/videos there will be, when they need to be finished by, how the keywords should be outputted, FTP details and so on. Make sure you have a checklist of all the practical housekeeping matters and get each issue resolved at the start. Don't take this for granted.

Saving Money on Keywording

2009-10-16T15:08:00.000+13:00

Keywording is essential, but with a bewildering array of options available it is easy to end up spending money unwisely. Here are some basic pointers to avoid overspending, and ensure you get value for money.

1. Check what you are already spending - but do it properly - If you are getting keywording done in-house make sure you have totalled up every cost, then work out the average per image. This will enable you to compare your current position with an outsourced service and give you a better feel for how you might organise things differently in your office to maximise efficiency. Include time spent not only on training and supervision, but also on recruiting. Try to work out if the keywording staff are ever employed on tasks which aren't really necessary just to keep them employed - be totally honest with yourself.

2. Calculate the cost of delay to market - If your images or video are being delayed from getting ot market because keywording is taking a long time, that's a cost. In some cases this is far more than the cost of keywording. Develop what modelling you can, to work this out. Granted, this will be far harder to work out than the cost of staff and electricity, but it's precisely the calculation you have to make.

3. Is poor quality destroying the value for money? - With whatever keywording system you use, the value and suitability of your keywording is hugely important. Spending 50 cents on keywording an image can be more expensive than spending a dollar if the cheaper image is far harder to find or is being rejected by third party sellers such as Getty.

4. Get the right keywording standard - Make sure that your images/videos are being keyworded to the necessary level, but no more. Overkeywording - putting in many obscure or barely relevant terms - pushes up the cost but can actually reduce the chances of your images/videos being found. They are also in grave danger of being rejected by third party resellers.

5. Sort out demarkation lines when going for outsourcing - Be sure you know who is doing what in any outsourcing arrangement. A cheap price may not be so cheap if you are spending hours and hours on quality control or preparing spreadsheets.

6. Avoid inflexible keywording software - Proprietory systems provided on a charge-for-use/subscription basis can be a death sentence for budget control, as you have no way of walking out the door should the system no longer serve your needs, or the provider decides to hike the price. The easier it is to move your keywording work elsewhere, the better it is.

7. Do it once, do it right - In the name of budget constraint it is tempting to do a cheap and cheerful job to start with and see how things go. The likelihood is that a poor job will result in poor sales results and the whole project will have been a waste of money. Re-keywording is an expensive exercise, but for a small amount extra you could have got the keywording you needed right from the start.

8. Offer payment in advance - Keywording companies have to employ labour to produce keywording. They are subject to the same pressures of cashflow as other businesses. Money up front may help cover their costs and that is worth a discount.

9. Go for volume - Bigger clients can get better deals. However many keywording companies may feel that long term regular business is more valuable than a big one-off project. Find out what the company values most before trying to get a discount for volume of business. By organising the work flow in a different way you might produce a better outcome.

10. Be prepared to wait, within reason - The longer it takes to get your keywording done, the cheaper it should be, all other things being equal. Fast turn around is normally worth more. Be wary of companies charging a high price and taking a long time to return the work. This may be a sign of poor organisation, lack or resources or lack of quality. Also, remember that the turnaround time is directly related to the costs associated with not having your images on the market (see above).

11. Get you own house in order - If you don't have appropriate model release information, captions are poorly written or you don't send keywording work on time, one way or another you are driving up the cost of keywording. This can happen directly in the price the keywording company must charge to cover the costs being needlessly added to the project, or in the simple cost of time you spend being inefficient in collating the information to give to the keywording company. Either way it's money down the drain.

12. Don't sweat the small stuff. - If you have very few images keywording may not even be worthwhile. A simple system of categories might work just as well.

Helping Customers Make Use of Your Keywords

2009-10-02T11:01:00.005+13:00

If you have good keywording it's a cardinal sin not to get your customers to take advantage of it. Here are some simple tips to help you maximise the value of your keywords.

1. Make Your Search Window Prominent - It's no coincidence that Google, the most successful search engine of all, has its search window as the most prominent feature of its home page. So why do so many other sites tuck their search windows away in the corner, and often very small?

2. Give Your Customers A Chance To Enter Their Search - Once again, Google shows the way with plenty of room for people to put a lengthy search in, using multiple words. People don't like putting in searches which they can't see because most of it is obscured by the small window. That may explain why on many celebrity sites researchers often stop at the celebrity's name - that's all there's room for!

3. Try A Tag Cloud - A tag cloud, such as the one on this page offers suggestions to researchers as to what words they could be using to find what they want. The cloud on this page is static, but you can have these generated dynamically depending on what initial search terms were used, thus allowing people to narrow or expand their search. The great thing about these clouds is that they show the most used search times by making the text bigger. People unfamiliar with searching, or how your particular site works, instantly understand how to search. It also acts as a prompt for people to use keywords get what they want much quicker, rather than giving up and going to a competitor's site.

To find out more about tag clouds, just search on Google. There are numerous companies offering software.

4. Warn Customers When Their Search Produces Too Many Results - If your site has a finite number of results it will generate, make sure you tell your customers about it. And while you're at it, it would be worth suggesting the search be narrowed using keywords. We know of a number of sites where the arbitrary cut off isn't advertised, leaving customers thinking the library hasn't got what they need.

5. Give Some Tuition - If you have advanced search facilities don't leave the customer to guess how those are used. Include a user-friendly tutorial in text or video.

Metadata Means Marketing

2009-09-25T22:09:00.008+12:00

It's an old adage that when times are tough you should spend more on advertising, not less. Yet many photo libraries ignore one of the most important advertisements they can run - effective metadata.

Perhaps because keywording and inputting metadata seems like such a mundane task, it is tempting to see it like cleaning the office, or maintaining the computer systems - something you can and should trim the budget for. That's a bad mistake.

If you consider that the purpose of advertising and marketing is to get people to choose your products ahead of the competition and to improve sales figures, then keywording satisfies that definition perfectly. What helps beat the competition better than having your images turn up ahead of theirs in a search? What boosts sales better than making your images easy to find?

Keywording helps in the same way as a billboard or an entry in the Yellow Pages helps people find a store.

The truth of all this came through to me a few weeks ago when I followed up on a prospective client who approached us to have his archive keyworded many months ago. He told me when I first spoke to him that his keywords were poor - no consistency and poor quality because keywording had been left to the photographers.

When I spoke to him recently, he said his business wasn't doing so well. Sales weren't doing what they should, despite the fact he was in a growing market niche. It was hard not to wonder what shape the business would have been in had the archive been properly keyworded.

Rescuing Bad Keywording - It's Normally Mission Impossible

2009-09-18T10:18:00.011+12:00

We are often approached by people wanting bad keywording made good, but almost without exception they end up having the keywords redone from scratch.

Apart from minor improvements or enhancements, "fixing" bad keywords is normally more trouble than it's worth. There are several reasons why:

1. Problems are rarely uniform. If there were just a few things to be fixed, and the problem was the same for every image, it would be a relatively efficient process to look for what needs fixing. However, if there are numerous problems in no set pattern then each image has to be reviewed in detail and a strategy worked out for each one, which is very time-consuming.

2. Keywords have to be removed as well as added. When keywording from scratch, pretty much you are only adding keywords. When fixing images you normally have to remove bad keywords (after idenitifying them first), which means a second process.

3. You can't trust the spelling. When images are badly keyworded it is difficult to know what can be relied upon. Whilst our own databases are constantly checked and rechecked to make sure place names, proper nouns and other words are correctly spelled, if a bad keywording job has been done you inevitably find yourself being drawn into doing a lot of checking of spelling because you're not sure if the same rigour was applied the first time the keywords were put in. Getting it right first time is very much faster than having to go to a dictionary or do research on the internet.

4. The keywords aren't the right standard. Sometimes the problem is that keywords need to be changed to meet particular keywording standards, such as Getty. This means doing things like finding and taking out plurals or assessing if particular words are acceptable for the standard. There are also problems with meeting requirements for the number of keywords, which can lead to lengthy delays working out which keywords need to be jettisoned.

5. Spam, spam, spam, spam. Sometimes images have been horrendously over-keyworded. If an image contains 300 words, and needs to be trimmed to about 50 relevant terms, it's obvious that mathematically you're better off putting the correct 50 in than working out which 250 you're best to get rid of.

6. When they're bad, they're very, very bad. Often the sheer volume of problems multiplies the time needed to fix the keywords, for all the reasons above.

Keywording Lemons - How To Avoid an Inflexible In-house Keywording System

2009-08-29T09:50:00.018+12:00

Versatility is the key to a good in-house keywording system, so try not to get hooked into software that limits your options.

Keywording is one of the most important determinants of image sales, yet in software packages designed to run image web sites or provide back end support for photo libraries keywording is often a very basic add-on. Worse, they can be extremely complicated affairs which are difficult and time-consuming to use.

If you ever want to change your keywording system to improve or change the type of keywords you have, or to try outsourcing, you may find yourself unable to do so without spending large amounts of money.

And if you ever decide to change to different web site or back end software, you may find your keywording cannot be transferred to the new system except at great cost.

Many such systems have been designed with little thought as to the cost of entering keywords, the standards of vocabularies and so on. After all, the people writing the software often aren't keyworders and may well have little experience of this unusual science.

Sometimes the keywording interfaces have been designed assuming that the people adding the keywords will be untrained and so limits need to be placed on how words are entered in order to achieve consistency. That has superficial appeal, but in our experience may limit the poor keywording only marginally. More importantly it may limit the ability for professional keyworders to do their job should they be employed in the future.

To help you evaluate the keywording aspects of image management software we've come up with this checklist. If you don't know the answers to these questions, you'll need to find out from your service provider :

1. Where are your keywords stored, and how easy are they to move?

If the keywords are held within IPTC fields of each image, or a database that can easily be exported to a spreadsheet then you are in the best position to move elsewhere or change procedures. If you are locked into using only the database of the service provider, or to export the keywords is costly, then you have a major problem in the making.

2. Does the keywording interface include a lot of check-boxes and drop-down menus to select keywords?

Check-boxes and drop-down menus in themselves aren't a problem, except that if not designed properly they will slow down keywording enormously. We once saw some software written for a client which had hundreds of check-boxes to choose from. It took forever scanning these to make a selection - mindbending and slow. Likewise, drop-down menus of single words are very slow to use. These devices also tend to make if hard to change vocabularies or word selections without lengthy updating of databases, interfaces or the software itself.

3. Can you drop keywords into a single keywording window?

Even if check-boxes and drop-down menus are used, having this feature will give some versatility. It allows different (ie more efficient) systems for generating keywords to be used independently of the software, with the resulting keywords pasted into the field.

4. Do you have to keyword one image at a time?

It seems like the obvious way to keyword images, but it's also the slowest way to work with images. Doing a number of images at once is far faster and tends also to be more consistent and accurate.

5. How easy is it to change keywords already written?

We are often asked to fix up poor keywording, and clients can be frustrated to find out that there is no easy way to do it without ponderously re-keywording using the software they already have. The ideal situation is that the images can be sent for revising with the keywords in IPTC. These can then be amended and resubmitted into the database with the resulting changes overwriting what's already there. Overwriting by re-keywording into a spreadsheet which is imported back into the database is also excellent. Too often, clients are told this cannot be done at all, or only with major, costly, rewriting of the software. Make sure easy overwriting is standard and you'll avoid headaches.

6. How is your keywording vocabulary organised?

To maintain consistency you should be using a vocabulary to assist in selection of keywords. At some time in the future you are likely to want to change that vocabulary, integrate it with a better one from a third party, or replace it altogether. How easy is it to do that? If the vocabulary can be exported and re-imported as a text document or spreadsheet this should be relatively easy. If the vocabulary is held in a series of fields inside the service provider's database and can't be easily exported, you are looking at a lot of time and money to rectify the problem.

7. Are you able to add or amend keywords any other way than by using the service provider's software?

This is the bottom line when assessing this sort of software for keywording purposes. If the answer to the question is "no", then outsourcing, major vocabulary upgrades, or moving to a better service provider are going to be painful if not downright impossible. Even if the answer is "yes", you may still be up for the cost of messy workarounds. And if the method of adding keywords with the existing software is slow, you will keep on paying the price for that slowness with each new image.

10 Myths of Keywording, and Why They're Busted

2009-08-21T12:13:00.022+12:00

If some people are to be believed, Neil Armstrong never walked on the moon, 911 was the work of the US Government and Elvis is still alive. The world is awash with myths, and so it is with keywording.

We thought we'd generate a little debate by coming up with our own list of keywording myths and then busting them:

1. The more keywords you have the better.

Having more keywords can be useful. There is a calculator which shows that more comprehensive keywording increases your changes of having your images found exponentially. But this benefit accrues only to a point before you are guilty of creating keyword spam - masses of keywords of little or no relevance to the image/video . The trick is knowing what words to put in and what to leave out, which is best left to professional keyworders.

2. Having the best search software is the most important thing to make my website/archive easy to search

Good search software is great, but it won't make up for poor keywording. Putting too much reliance on fancy software and ignoring keywording is like going fishing with a fancy rod, but the wrong bait.

3. It doesn't matter if keyworders are working in a second language.

Any language, especially English, has nuances and subtleties which can be missed by non-native speakers. Keywording the obvious literal stuff may work okay, but once you get into concepts, historical events, celebrities or anything else requiring cultural knowledge the non-native speaker can quickly come unstuck. Ask yourself this, would you want someone keywording your images for the French market if all they had was high school French?

4. Getting photographers to do their own keywording is a great way to save money.

Photographers are great people, daring, artistic, creative, you name it. But keyworders they're not. Apart from the odd gifted individual, our experience of photographers' keywording is that it ranges from fair to apalling. More importantly, no two photographers keyword the same way, so the chance of getting any consistency in the database is negligible. We know of one company whose photogrpahers spelled the name Nicky Hilton six different ways.

5. Doing keywording inhouse is cheaper and easier then outsourcing.

It is rare that managers work out the true cost of inhouse keywording. Most focus on the hourly rate, but don't count overheads, the cost of training and recruiting, nor the money lost when keyworders don't have much to do and dawdle through their day.

6. Celebrity images don't need keywording because people just search using the name of the celebrity.

Once upon a time that would have been true, but as the number of images of celebrities skyrockets, only the tiniest of photo libraries could seriously adhere to this philosophy. When you search for "Britney Spears" and 20,000 records come up (true story) what are you going to do without keywords to narrow the search? Sadly many celebrity photo libraries make it rather hard for people to enter keywords or even find the search window, prefering to deal with the problem by limiting the results to say the most recent 1,000 images. What a pity the image the client wanted was image 1,001.

7. Spending money on keywording is something you do once you have the sales to pay for it.

This falls into the category of necessity dressed up as virtue. Many companies just don't have the cash to improve the keywording standards of their libraries and have to live with it. The obvious point is that if money was spent on keywording to improve sales in the first place the chances of being strapped for cash would be reduced. The same arguments are used to justify cutting back on advertising when times are tough. That doesn't work either.

8. No one complains about our poor keywording so we don't have a problem.

Possibly, but no complaints simply means no complaints. It's just as likely your clients have long since given up on your site and are buying from your competitors. Having a reputation for searchability is hard won and easily lost. Try searching your site and see if it's easy or difficult, then you might view the lack of complaints in a whole new light.

9. Getting sales staff or my secretary to do keywording during their down time is a good way to save money.

Money will be saved all right, but by the people who don't buy images from you. Getting untrained staff to keyword is a complete waste of their time and the resulting poor keywording will almost certainly harm sales. You'd be much better off getting the staff to do more or what they're actually good at.

10. In the celebrity business getting keywording isn't important because people only want the very latest images.

No doubt the latest images tend to sell best, but as Chris Anderson points out in his book The Long Tail, all those archive sales can add up to be even more than the earnings from the latest hits. To access those old images you need something a bit better than a cryptic caption or a three word headline. Unfortunately it is easy to be enthralled with the new images and forget the cold hard business logic of running a photo library which means putting as many images as practicable to work for you. You don't have to keyword every image in the archive, but ignoring it completely means your archive is more of a liability than an asset.

Photo Libraries Should Try the Gordon Ramsay Approach

2009-08-14T19:02:00.009+12:00

We're constantly amazed by the number of people who tell us they have no keywording problem, yet even five minutes spent trying to search their library reveals limited search results, contradictory and misleading results, and a lack of organisation and consistency.

Our advice to people running photo libraries who wonder why they're not making as much money as they should, is to adopt the Gordon Ramsay approach. The reality TV chef may have a foul mouth, but he can teach a lot to any photo library owner who watches the Kitchen Nightmare series in which Ramsay turns around struggling restaurants.

One of the first things he does is go into the cool store to see how things are organised. Unsurprisingly there is rotting food, filth and even insects. The staff and management are amazed at what he finds.

Such a horror is invariably symptomatic of a business in which managers and owners simply aren't seeing what is under their noses.

The image database is the equivalent of the restaurant cool store, yet how many managers and owners regularly inspect that database to see if images are easy to find, well organised and nicely presented?

During a sales call to a major photo agency we were once told that there was no problem with searching the photo library because there had been no complaints. Clearly that was the case, as the archive was so badly keyworded you needed to be a psychic to find anything. Undoubtedly the customers weren't complaining because they had given up and gone elsewhere to libraries which could be searched.

In preparing our report to that photo agency we pointed out that good keywording had many spin-off benefits including building a reputation for searchability which would attract ongoing custom.

Unfortunately management were totally ignoring the problem which they could have found in five minutes, and we never heard from them again.

At present we are engaged in a series of appraisals of metadata on retail web sites. We're happy to do it, but amazingly the problems we find are so obvious and profound the owners of the businesses should have been able to find them almost immediately, even if they didn't know the precise cause or remedies.

Our advice is to do regular mystery shopping of your photo library to see how easy images are to find, how many search results you get and so on. You'll soon find out how good you are. Even libraries with extensive keywording can benefit from this approach.

It is tempting to rely on web companies' lists of customers' searches to do this work for you. Such information can be useful, but it doesn't tell the whole story. How many of those researchers abandoned their efforts because of irrelevant results or because the best pictures were 23 pages into the search? How easy was it to use keywords? Were they encouraged to do so and achieve better results.

The best way to assess that is to do it yourself, start looking in the coolstore like Gordon Ramsay.

Are You Down Wid It? - Keywording for the Slang Generation

2009-08-07T15:34:00.006+12:00

Colloquialisms , street language, call it what you will, slang presents a challenge for keyworders.

I was having lunch the other day with a friend involved in IT and we got to talking about keywords and he mentioned that a number of the 20-something staff members he employed were searching the web using text language, or should that be "txt lgng". He said that it was amazing how much came up when it was used.

Perhaps I was looking on the wrong sites, but when I tried it I didn't have that much luck. Regardless, my friend did raise an important issue. How do keyworders address the needs of people who like to search using non-standard English?

In our own vocabularies we already have a certain amount of slang -"nasty" for instance to mean sneering or even sexy.

English is a language on the move as I was once told, and anyone who doubts this should borrow our English-American dictionary to see how far it's moved already. In the United States "Fall" means "Autumn", "kitchen counter" means "kitchen bench", a pram is a baby buggy and on it goes.

The thing about slang is that it crops up everywhere and has different meanings in different places. "Pot plant" in some places means a marijuana plant, in others it's a harmless indoor ornamental plant such as a begonia. An Australian keeps his beer cold at a cricket match in an eski, a New Zealander in a chilly bin. Americans where flip-flops, others prefer to call them thongs, in New Zealand they're jandals.

I don't have any scientific evidence, but my bet is that the amount of slang being added to the language is accelerating due to the internet and the growth of other mass media.

Do You Have A Case of Synonym Fever?

2009-07-31T11:11:00.006+12:00

When constructing keywording vocabularies it's easy to be overcome with Synonym Fever and make them over-elaborate.

One of the regular mistakes made when vocabularies are being built is to think that every word in the dictionary and thesaurus needs to be included. We see it sometimes in vocabularies sent to us where outlandish words are used simply because they constitute synonyms.

"Creature" is a synonym for "animal", but it is unlikely someone would bother using it. Likewise would you use the word "human" rather than "man", "woman" or "person"?

Apart from the fact that making a vocabulary too big wastes time and money in the construction phase, there are other drawbacks in throwing the net too wide.

The bigger the vocabulary the slower the process of selecting the necessary keywords when entering them. Meanwhile there could be problems with including the many words with double meanings, such as "pen" used for writing and the "pen" used to hold farm animals.

When it somes to deciding where to draw the line, it's best to take a common sense approach and ask if you think the sort of person searching for your images or videos would use the words you are including. Latin names would not be suitable for a library being searched by teenagers, but could be well worth including if university academics were the main researchers.

Whatever you do, avoid getting catchign Synonym Fever and thinking that adding more and more words is always a good idea.

Stop Being an Image Slave and Get Your Life Back

2009-07-24T10:32:00.007+12:00

Did you hear the one about the photo agency owner who worked all the hours that God sent sending his images out to clients and keywording them?

He knew that both functions were vital but decided he couldn't afford to pay someone else to do them.

If he'd spent time looking at the true cost of his decision he would have realised that as a photographer he could have been earning a couple of hundred dollars an hour. As a photo sales person he could have earned $50 an hour.

But he was choosing to do keywording and transmission work that paid only $25 an hour. To make matters worse, his keywords weren't that good. The result was he was holding back sales which meant the value of his labour was less than the money he cost the company.

False economy is a big reason why people in the picture business suffer from burn out or find the industry isn't as much fun as it used to be. It is also a contributor to business failure.

By outsourcing keywording, workflow and distribution of images he could have achieved the following:

1. Got a good nights sleep.

2. Spent more time with his family and friends.

3. Had the chance to spend more time doing photography, his first passion.

4. Made more money.

5. Improved his health.

6. Saved his sanity.

ProPhotoFiler - A New Option for Photographers Wanting to Transmit Their Images

2009-07-17T11:38:00.007+12:00

Distributing images to an array of photo libraries, news agencies, editors and colleagues is often a time-consuming task to organise, and challenges bandwidth at the best of times. That's why I was interested to find ProPhotoFiler which looks like it could be an answer to transmission problems for photographers in the field, whether in a war zone or a "shoot out" at a movie premiere.

PPF is the brainchild of American news photographer David Gross who decided a low-bandwidth, no-frills way of sending images was needed after a news agency lost a series of images he had been sending them for several hours from a Baghdad cafe.

The result is pretty much what he had in mind. The pages of the web site www.prophotofiler.com are unburdened by graphics, and no bandwidth is wasted in transmission which goes through the browser.

What's most surprising though is the number of features that have been crammed into this low-overhead service. You can elect to send a mix of emails and transmissions via FTP, plus your image sets can be turned into contact sheets. There's even a caption translater.

That means the various end-users you are sending to don't have to be plugged into a proprietory system. Provided they have FTP or email you should be good to go.

Sign-up and set-up are straightforward and are an object lesson in how to make a system easy to understand without the need for a salesperson, tech guy or other intermediary having to help you through the steps.

I understand that further development of the site is likely, but even as it is, PFF is a more than useful addition to the options for multiple transmission, and at a reasonable cost.

Image Triage, Sorting the Wheat From the Chaff to Save Time and Unlock Sales

2009-07-10T08:43:00.006+12:00

Unsure which of your images are worth keywording, or those which are worth trying to sell? Worried because your archive is poorly organised in computer folders? You could be in need of Image Triage.

In the past year we've worked with a number of clients who have been confronted with a problem of working out how to make money from their library of unkeyworded or poorly keyworded images. In many instances, full keywording of every shot would be prohibitively expensive. Often identifiable sections of archives are so unlikely to be in demand it's not worth doing anything with those images.

The trick is to know where to draw the lines.

Our Image Triage service addresses those problems by having our senior staff look through an archive and recommend a keywording/sales plan based on those images which would benefit from:

1. A high-level of keywording for the most saleable, some or all of which might be offered for sale through a third party such as Alamy.

2. Minimal keywording and metadata revision for images with lesser sales potential.

3. No additional metadata, or only the tiniest amount such as a name or small caption.

Clients have been pleasantly surprised by how much time and money they were able to save by working with our team. In some cases we've been able to recommend options which have changed the idea of marketing an archive from a major headache to an achievable plan. This includes recommendations as to the keywording standard which would best suit the uses the images would be put to.

Unfortunately some archives exist only as a rambling collection of images in poorly named, disorganised files and folders. Sometimes images are lumped in with Word documents or other files based around particular projects.

In those cases we can catalogue the folders, sift out the images, eliminate duplicates and poor-quality images if required, and reorganise the files and folders into a meaningful structure. This can give people a much better idea of the number of images they have and their quality. Even if no keywording takes place, this can be a valuable step in making images more accessible.

To find out more about Image Triage, email keedupinfo@keedup.com

Are Your Online Sales Suffering Because of Bad Metadata?

2009-07-03T10:57:00.011+12:00

Selling online is a fantastic way to reach customers quickly and cheaply, boost sales and reduce inventories. However many online sellers miss the basic step of using keywords and metadata which can help customers find their products.

In recent months we've begun working with retailers to help them include metadata which is meaningful, consistent and accurate for their clients.

What we've found is that as a rule retailers and other online sellers spend considerable money - sometimes in the millions - to produce a good-looking web site. Normally this includes a sophisticated search system.

The sad thing is that after spending all that money, the metadata and keywording for each product can be substandard, letting down all the work already done. Customers have trouble finding the products they want, or they find way to many of the wrong products. In some cases they are engaging in an elaborate guessing game to work out what word the seller has used to describe their product.

Such frustrations don't last long however, as customers tend to vote with their mice and quickly move to another, easier-to-search site.

Adding the crucial metadata is frequently done by buyers, merchandisers or suppliers. Such people have great product knowledge, but as they are operating as individuals there is often little consistency in how products are identified. They are also unlikely to anticipate the sort of searches customers actually use.

Bringing synonyms together and using words based on clients' needs, not just product description, can greatly enhance the buying experience and boost sales.

Take the word "gift". That's a fantastic keyword to help customers solve the problem of what to find for a going away present, a birthday gift or something for under the Christmas tree. Often this keyword produces no results, or can result in some strange search results. On one site we examined, "gift" produced a heat pump, not exactly a stocking stuffer!

Keywording can also promote cross sales by including products synonymous with what is being searched for. For some stores, including other MP3 players along with i-pods could be a good idea for instance.

Metadata used for internal search has the added benefit that it can be used for product listings in SEO for Google, making products easy to find on the net as well as within the store's site.

Once a product is well keyworded, the online seller can also use that data to create marketing campaigns based on different configurations of products - his and hers, just for kids and so on - without having to do search engine gymnastics to find all the products for the promotion.

Unlocking The Goldmine

2009-06-26T14:59:00.005+12:00

Museums, lending libraries, publishing companies and many other "non" photo libraries are sitting on goldmines of images.

Ever since the digital revolution began, the cost of transmitting images across the world has fallen dramatically. With the advent of digital cameras and cheap scanning prices, the cost of selling those images has fallen further.

What has continued to be a barrier however is the cost of actually doing the selling, monitoring usage, negotiating prices and keeping track of all of the above.

These days, even that cost is coming down with the likes of Photoshelter, and now ImageSpan's LicenseStream, offering cost-effective ways of marketing images without the need to employ a group of dedicated sales people and managers.

Many of the functions of a digital photo library are now being done for a small fee, even to the point of tracking illegal usages and selling directly on Google.

The last part of the mix is to have those images keyworded so they can be found in the first place.

So for the less traditional sources of photography, or video for that matter, the time of opportunity is now at hand.

Searchable Video - A Great Source Of New Revenue

2009-06-19T09:10:00.006+12:00

Short videos for stock and web use are a growing source of income for image libraries - just make sure your clients can find the clips easily.

In the past year we've noticed a growing interest in keywording of video clips, and welcomed some new clients as a result. The basic message we are getting is that many companies are now adding video in the same subject area in which they have built their reputation for still images.

This is a logical step forward, although not always well planned for. Adding video clips to a photo library's offering presents a number of challenges on the technical side, not the least being the sheer volume of data that video creates.

Once those problems are overcome it is important to make the videos easy to find. As numbers normally start out small, it is tempting to think customers will just browse about. But it is a better idea to start as you mean to go on and have keywords from the begining.

As the video clip business gows - which it will - companies with a reputation for easy searching will have an advantage.

When having videos keyworded there are a number of factors to be taken into consideration.

1. Length of video makes a big difference to the cost and value of keywording. Keeping the clips short makes them more saleable, quicker to choose from, and gives the keywords more meaning because there is a strong theme and normally only one setting. Think of it this way: how many keywords would you need to describe everything in a 30 second clip of a bird singing in a cage as opposed to the keywording need to cover everything in Gone With The Wind?

2. Video often includes movement, so include appropriate verbs to describe that action.

3. Concepts are particularly important for video clips as the idea a clip is trying to convey can involve the bringing together of various elements of action, setting, sound and so on.

4. Speaking of sound, make sure you keyword this as rigorously as the visuals. In some cases what is being said, or noises being made can make all the difference to the meaning and possible uses of the clip.

5. Think about what technical keywords you'll need such as "cut away" or "slow motion".

6. Perhaps most impotantly, aim for consistency in keywording. There are even more variables in video keywording, so if you can have the keywording done professionally to minimise the variations so much the better.

Automatic Keywording And Robots Which Do The Can Can - How Long Will We Wait?

2009-05-15T16:02:00.013+12:00

A couple of years ago I went to an industries fair to see the Honda Asimo robot that was the envy of the world, the product of millions of dollars and millions of hours of research and development. Imagine my surprise when I discovered its greatest party trick was to walk up stairs without hanging onto the rail. One of my teenage sons summed up the experience with the words "big deal" as we filed out of the auditorium.

I've been taken back to that day by some recent musings by colleagues about the future of automatic keywording, where computers can read an image and keyword it.

Here are some examples of state-of-the-art automatic keywording from ALIPR as selected by John Harrington in an excellent article in Photo Business Forum late last year:

In the first example the automatic system had a good stab, although the keywords are far more limited than the sort of thing which comes across my computer screen every day.

In the second example the result is more comedic than keywording. Anyone working at Keedup who regularly added words like "dinosaur" and "firearm" to a picture of a boat wouldn't be kept on very long. Admittedly the vocabulary being used in this development project was limited to a few hundred words, but coming up with completely wrong words shows this technology is in a similar league to that Honda robot, or worse.

It's been suggested to me that a more immediate and successful application of this technology is in the use of image recognition software to help researchers find similar or related objects, thus adding a new system of researching which avoids or supplements keyword searching. I went to the ALIPR site and got the following "similar" images which the system found:

I don't know about you, but a boat and a cow don't really seem that similar. There were some images which were more alike for sure - including at least one with a boat in it - but this is a little less impressive than I'd expected.

So at present everyone agrees this technology has a way to go.

The questions to be asked are how long will that journey take, and will they get there at all?

I would also like to know in the context of automatic keywording just what "there" means? If the ALIPR project had produced perfect results in the boat image above, that would be progress, but what about concepts, sayings, colour of meaning, working out which object is most important (most prominent in the frame isn't the same thing), prioritising keywords and interpreting emotions in context with other objects in the frame.... The list goes on and on.

What researchers will need to bear in mind is that for automatic keywording to be really useful it will have to be as good as a human being, which is an incredibly tall order. It's hard to imagine why anyone would spend the sort of money that will require, except as a byproduct of some other, bigger endeavour.

Honda may have spent millions on getting a robot to walk up stairs, but at least we can see the huge market potential of a robot even if it doesn't dance the Can Can.

Model Release Info Can't Be Forgotten For Getty Submission

2009-05-01T14:52:00.007+12:00

Model release information is crucial for submissions to Getty Images, so make sure your paperwork and keywords are up to scratch.

In the January Getty metadata guidelines it is made clear that ages and ethnicities need to be included in metadata on the basis of the accurate information contained in model releases.

No matter how plausible, guessing this information isn't acceptable.

According to the Getty Search Data Review Team:

"If an image has people but no model release details to work from you can apply very broad age terms such as adult, child or baby but you should avoid guessing more specific ages.

"Please remember there are legal issues around model ages if the image it to be used for certain types of advertising such as alcohol or tobacco where they have to be of a legal age to consume these products. So we do need to be careful.

"You should never guess an ethnicity, those keywords must be supported by a model release to be applied."

So when keywording your images for submission to Getty - or when outsourcing your keywording - it is imperative that model release and keywords match. We have heard of some photo libraries and photographers who have unfortunately had their images rejected because of this problem, so be careful.

Fashionable Keywords Are No Substitute For Quality Keywords

2009-04-24T14:50:00.007+12:00

I've read quite a bit recently about the idea that image sales can be boosted by using the most popular current keywords. It's a nice idea, but don't be fooled into thinking this is some magic bullet to boost sales.

Having good keywording is essential to boost sales, but we recommend that you use quality keywords and not worry too much about what keywords are said to be th most used currently.

Here are the reasons why:

1. How do you know for sure that the "hot" keywords do what their promoters suggest? If you feel tempted to trust the claims, then ask for some documented evidence first.

2. Fashions come and go. So what might be a "hot" keyword now, might be an unpopular keyword later.

3. Focusing on a hot list may distract you from full, quality keywording for a wide range of uses.

4. You may be tempted to use "hot" keywords because they are "hot" rather than because they are relevant. "Togetherness" might be a current favourite, but there's not much use putting that into a picture of a carrot. Pretty soon you are on the road to keyword spamming and having your images rejected.

5. Perhaps most importantly, your images may become a small fish in a big pool. If everyone keywords with exactly the same keywords then it will be a lottery as to which turns up in any given search. So by all means include whatever words you think will help, but it may be that slight variations, using different synonyms and so forth will produce even better results by making you a big fish in a smaller pool of results. Variety has its advantages.

Recession Tip: Use Keywording to Open New Market Segments, Win Sales

2009-04-19T10:45:00.007+12:00

Look at any business commentator's guide to surviving the recession and you'll find three common themes: reduce production costs, collect your debts, and don't skimp on marketing.

In obeying that holy trinity, it is easy to forget that keywording is a marketing tool, not an operational expense, and in the rush to reduce costs throw the baby out with the bath water. Harnessed properly, keywords can give you an advantage over your competitors, help you find new clients and open whole new market segments.

Perhaps because keywording is part of image workflow and doesn't involve booking advertisements or making cold calls it appears to belong to be part of production not selling.

But stand back for a few moments and think about that. Marketing is the art/science of improving sales by finding out what customers want and making it easy for them to buy it. Just as an advertisement enables people to find out about the existence of products they want, so keywording enables customers find out about the existence of images they want. Looking at it from the other end, if you stop advertising or promoting your images, people won't find them and sales will fall. The same is true with keywording.

Similarly, the quality of keywording is important in exactly the same way as the quality of a company's advertising and promotions is important. Few people think it makes sense to lower sales by producing ineffective, poorly-targeted advertisements. Keywording needs just as much attention.

For that reason, keywording should be done by people or companies who know how. To leave keywording to the untrained is like getting the receptionist to write your advertising copy, or the janitor to tell you what web sites should carry your banner ads.

It is also important to think about what end users want from their keywords. There are the obvious criteria of keywords being organised, consistent, and spelled correctly.

Relevance is also vital. In that regard try to think about what your customers want, and orientate your keywords that way.

Done intelligently you can use keywords to open up new market segments. Pictures of people hiking, keyworded in a general fashion, would be useful for many customers But if you added specialist keywords aimed at say the business market (investors reaching their goal, finances getting on top of you, for instance) you could reach new customers who wouldn't have thought about using those images in that way before.

Obviously you have to be careful not to over-stretch and start adding keywords which are irrelevant - keyword spam - but provided you have orientated your keywords intelligently you can uncover new opportunities and revitalise images which aren't selling.

Get Your WIP Out and Save Time and Money

2009-04-03T14:53:00.006+13:00

If you want to improve speed to market, improve sales and save money whilst maintaining or enhancing quality you'll need to eliminate efficiency's enemy - Work In Progress, or WIP for short.

Many people reading this post will be all too familiar with this problem. A set of images comes in, it waits for someone to edit them. When someone finally gets to it (there's so much other work to do) that set has to wait in line behind other images backed up. From then on the lifecycle of the image continues along the workflow chain: an occasional flurry of activity in the retouching, keywording and sales departments, but long periods of inactivity.

Imagine if you were one of those images. Wouldn't all that waiting around to go on the web site/out to clients be a bit frustrating? Actually, you've probably had exactly the same experience as one of your images when you had to wait at a doctor's office, or endured standing in a long line of customers at the bank or the movies.

Book after book has been written about WIP relating to the manufacturing industry. Eliminating WIP is what made Toyota the world's most successful car maker. It can also help you become a more successful photo library manager.

Every time you have images waiting around, not available for purchase, or not keyworded to a standard that makes them easily searchable, you're suffering from a WIP problem.

In the stock photography market delays of weeks or months in getting images keyworded are not uncommon (we work hard to get images back to our clients as soon as we can). With celebrity photography delays of hours can be crucial. In both cases, delay is costing money.

One way to get round that problem is to shove images out the door by doing the minimum of work to keyword and make them look presentable. If Toyota adopted that philosophy they would have been out of business years ago. No matter how cheap or fast a car is to build, no one wants a vehicle with one of the wheels missing or the seats not properly screwed down. Rushing to get a poor-quality, hard-to-find image to market is easily achievable. But all you'll do is move the pile of WIP to your photo library where bad images won't be found or bought.

If you have a commitment to quality you are some way down the track to succeeding, but that's far from the whole story.

Consider this scenario: You have only one keyworder processing your images. He/she has enough hours in the year to do all the work you need - so that's efficient, a savvy use of money, right? That would be true if the images came in a nice steady stream. More likely, photographers send images in batches at unpredictable times so the workflow goes up and down like a yoyo. So either the one keyworder gets swamped (and maybe reduces quality by cutting corners in a desperate attempt to keep up) or you have to hire a second or even a third employee to cope with the busy times. Maybe you call in a guy from sales who can help, albeit inefficiently as keywording isn't his thing.

Whichever way you look at it, you're wasting quite a lot of money and compromising quality at the same time.

We suggest that in looking at your overall workflow you create a spreadsheet that lists all the stages of production from the images point of view. Add up all the time and see how long it takes you to process/keyword/send out an image if you include the time the image sits around waiting. You may be shocked to find it is hours, days, weeks or even months. In the celebrity business you might also find that if photographers sent their image in quicker you'd have way more time to edit and keyword. However it shakes down, you'll be getting a truer picture of your production line than you've ever had before.

When it comes to archive images, it might be years before you get images properly to market with worthwhile keywording and captioning. All time in which sales could have been made, but weren't.

In the international celebrity picture market we've heard of a number of companies who are losing out on sales because they keep office hours in only one time zone. Crucial images are therefore sent out looking awful, with no keywords, or not dealt with at all until staff turn up the following day.

A number of businesses exist to help with consultancy services in this areag. Any book about Toyota, or Lean 6 Sigma (the jargon term for the toyota-style efficiency techniques) is also useful.

Does Your Keywording Company Really Speak The Lingo?

2009-03-27T12:59:00.006+13:00

Keywording anything more than the most basic literal terms in English requires advanced knowledge of the language - but how do you know the company you're thinking of working with really meets that standard?

Some time ago we looked at offering German keywording, something we're still considering. It was suggested that we could use English keywording, and translate automatically using software. The experiment was less than ideal as words in English have such shades of meaning that translation without full knowledge of both languages was sub-standard. We resolved at that time to only ever keyword in German with people who could really speak and write the language (we have two such people on staff). It also underlined to us how important knowledge of English was for the keywording we already did.

We've had quite a bit of feedback from clients and potential clients that suggests English skills aren't always the best amongst the keywording fraternity. These tales of woe, which brought people to our door, prompted me to think about how a photo library or photographer would be able to pick which companies possess the necessary skills.

My suggestion is that you follow these guidelines:

1. Does the company web site read like it's been written by someone with knowledge of the language? If the quality of English is poor on a public web site, what will it be like behind closed doors? In making this assessment, don't worry so much about spelling mistakes and punctuation errors - anyone can use a spellchecker - look at the way the language is used. A dead giveaway is if the sentences are technically correct but use words and terms which are particularly old-fashioned or overly formal. You know the sort of thing: "our esteemed company wishes to engage in a partnership with your corporation to facilitate the mutual enfusion of money to the benefit of all". Sounds a bit like spam, doesn't it.

2. What English qualifications do the company's keyworders have? Are they native English speakers, university graduates, or did they learn English at high school. If the latter is the case, think about a language you might have learned in high school such as French or German. Would you consider yourself qualified to keyword in those languages?

3. Speak to someone. Picking a keywording company on the basis of email alone is dangerous. Talk to someone at the company and see if they can speak English well. It's not a conclusive measure of keywording quality, but as with the web site, if the person fronting for the company isn't proficient, what is the English like elsewhere?

4. Have a detailed look at the work. When all is said and done, this is by far the most important measure. Check the concepts included and look for archaic words. If the concepts are more sparse than you expected, or confusing, that's not good. If the terminology isn't in the modern idiom you should also ask more questions. Don't restrict your quality control to the initial sample. Perhaps the company has some stars who do all the samples, and the actual production is of lesser quality.

Dealing With IPTC Problems

2009-03-13T14:48:00.006+13:00

Using IPTC fields is a fantastic way of transporting your metadata along with your images, but be wary of compatibility issues.

IPTC fields in jpegs are part of a universal standard to facilitate the exchange of information (metadata) attached principally to jpegs.

For all that this standard is suppsoed to be universal, you will find that various image editing and image library programmes identify these fields with different labels. So one image library database might refer to an IPTC field as "State", another as "State/Province", and yet another as "Province/State".

Sometimes the field names seem to bear only a passing resemblance to one another. We've seen two different pieces of software refer to the same field as "Author" and "Byline".

The confusion this causes is more than academic. If you are trying to import a picture into an image database and you want to import the metadata for the field "Byline" but discover that Photoshop refers to it as "Author" you can find a lot of holes in your imported metadata.

Problems also arise if the image library database software is designed to read IPTC in only Mac jpegs as opposed to PC, or vice-versa. All those great keywords and captions could end up as blanks when the images are imported.

To avoid major frustration when buying image library software in particular, we advise that you choose software which can collect its metadata from any IPTC field and write it to any nominated field within its database. (Being able to import data from a spreadsheet or CSV file is also useful.) So if a photographer has saved his copyright information in the field "Instructions", make sure you can import into whatever field you want within your database, such as "Special Instructions". Also make sure that the software reads IPTC from both Mac and PC jpegs.

Avoid like the plague any software which writes and reads IPTC information in its own special part of the jpeg as opposed to the fields normally used by Photoshop. This can lead to the IPTC information being invisible to some other programmes or from being overwritten by your image library software.

Ask the software sellers about these particular problems before purchase. If they don't know what you are talking about, find someone who does, or buy another product. You can also try importing IPTC into a demo version and see how you get on.

I know this sounds like very geeky stuff, but believe me the consequences for being able to run your photo library or web site, or to get keywording done, can be horrendous.

As the saying goes, act in haste, repent at leisure.

Three Of The Best - Web Resources for Celebrity Keywording

2009-03-06T16:22:00.007+13:00

When it comes to checking names, finding out intricate details of people's careers and working out what episode of Seinfeld hosted a certain guest star, there are three resources you can't go past.

We get asked for a lot of weird and wonderful detail to be included in celebrity/entertainment images. Whilst in the vastness of the internet you can find a lot of information to help with your metadata - fan sites, model agency sites, and so on, you can't go past these three for depth of information, ease of use and all round reliability.

1. Wikipedia.org The information available about TV Shows, music and movies is astoundingly detailed and reliable. Some things, such as who appeared in which episode of a sitcom, on which week, is absolutely mind boggling. If you ever need to include a piece of information about a star or their work in your metadata and have no idea how to get it, Wikipedia could save your bacon.

2. IMDB.com (The Internet Movie Database). The absolute bible in terms of the spelling of stars' names and of cataloguing their various projects, acting, directing, whatever. There are many "official" and fan sites out there, but you'd be amazed how often their information is wrong.

3. NNDB.com Kind of like IMDB but covers virtually every aspect (or so it seems) of fame and famous people in business, sport, entertainment and much, much more. Here's what they say about themselves on the site:
NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts.)
But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been associating with.

PhotoShelter Survey Shows Photo Buyers See Keywording As Vital

2009-02-27T09:22:00.008+13:00

A survey of 580 photo buyers - commercial and editorial - has found that keywording is vital for photo sellers' web sites.

The questionnaire, sent out by photo library web hosting company PhotoShelter, asked respondents how they felt about the value of keywording on a web site. Almost 90% said that keywording was either a requirement for using the site (45%), was very important (31%) or somewhat important (14%). Only 3% of respondents disliked keywording or thought it was unimportant.

Just as significantly, keywording ranked as the second most important feature overall for a photo web site, ahead of being able to buy images from the site, creating a lightbox or being able to email images. Only fast loading of images ranked more highly.

Photo buyers surveyed included big names such as Time magazine, USA Today, McGraw Hill, Penguin, Ogilvy and McCann Erickson. The survey was conducted in December last year.

As an overall observation, PhotoShelter noted that there were conflicting roles when running a photo web site: artistic and commercial. Sometimes the artistic impulses such as Flash animations (disliked by the vast majority of respondents) could get in the way of the commercial success of a site.

To view the full survey results, go to:

http://www.photoshelter.com/mkt/photo-buyer-survey-2009

Have You Got a Case of the IKS (Inadequate Keyword Syndrome)?

2009-02-19T18:15:00.003+13:00

Inadequate Keyword Syndrome, or IKS for short, is something to be strenuously avoided as it tends to keep the patient in a chronic state of bad health.

Its symptoms include: difficulty finding images, difficulty sorting images, and low image sales. Related conditions include chronic customer dissatisfaction and acute research staff frustration.

Causes are many, but chief amongst them is a lack of knowledge of metadata systems and inadequate search mechanisms which lead the patient to believe that keywords are of limited value.

In all seriousness, we had a potential editorial photo client say to us recently that images required no more than five keywords including the name of the person in the image.

Take out the person’s name and you’re left with 2-3 keywords which add extra meaning. In a fashion-obsessed world this would leave little ability to describe clothing, shoes, jewelery, let alone the facial expression, the location and so on.

As a real life example, I was once asked by a client to find a picture of Madonna, but all the client could think of was that she was wearing a grey blouse. “Grey blouse” was all I needed to find the appropriate image out of many thousands in less than a minute. With a five keyword limit it would simply be a lottery to as to whether “grey blouse” would have made the cut. More likely, you’d have to trawl through a huge number of images because “grey blouse” wouldn’t be found.

Clients faced with having to wade through unnecessary pictures eventually go elsewhere for their images. Let’s face it, there’s plenty of competition.

One insidious aspect of IKS is that when patients realise they’re afflicted, the cost of the medicine to cure the problem is often the full cost of reputable keywording. That means the labour already expended has to be junked along with all those lost sales and work hours wasted on slow searches. Better not to contract the disease in the first place.

Fashion Hawk Helps Keedup Produce Fashionable Keywords

2009-02-13T18:47:00.009+13:00

Keedup's new staff training blog, Fashion Hawk, has beem launched to keep staff updated on the latest fashion trends which are so important to celebrity keywording.

In the past we have used exhaustive paper manuals, but we believe Fashion Hawk - a private blog exclusively for our staff- will make the process of keeping up with the names of the latest fashion items much easier.

We're now able to identify a look, a style, a label and have examples on our blog within a few minutes so that staff can incorporate those items in their keywording. Fashion, by it's very nature is constantly evolving so this is a perfect tool.

Whilst the paper manuals had, and still have, their place, Fashion Hawk is a faster way of keeping up with fashion trends, plus keyworders can keep the blog open beside their keywording window and use it as a full indexed reference while they work.

Having one central repository of knowledge also helps with consistency and facilitates the one-on-one personal training our staff receive on an ongoing basis.

Keedup already uses another blog to keep staff up with changes in technical matters as well as the usual items such as rostering and company announcements. Its success has prompted the creation of Fashion Hawk, with at least one more training blog likely to be brought on line soon.

Future-Proof Your Keywording System

2009-02-04T14:41:00.005+13:00

Creating your own keywording system can be a challenging and rewarding experience, but before beginning you need to have the right goals in mind.

Most importantly, you must make sure that your system will stand the test of time. There are no prizes for creating a fantastic system if it can't be updated and operated by staff with no previous training five years from launch.

We occasionally run into such systems which were the brainchild of one talented person, but hardly anyone else can operate it, or fully understands its guiding principles. Heaven knows what happens when that talented person leaves, but it won't be pretty.

By the same token, we've come across inputting systems which are written in such a way that it is impossible to keyword at anything more than a snail's pace because the design of the vocabularly has dominated over the design of systems for adding keywords or altering that vocabulary.

To avoid these sorts of problems, we suggest you follow these rules:

1. Require documentation of the system with easy-to-understand manuals from day one. Don't wait for the launch of the system before thinking about it. You may well find that the person who wrote the system can't write a manual, or more likely doesn't have time to because they are busy teaching people how to use the new system (without a manual), troubleshooting, answering questions, making improvements and so on.

2. Keep the keyword inputting as flexible as possible so that your web site or special software is not required. The easiest way to achieve this is for the keywording to be done at image level, or by the importation of keywords from a spreadsheet. That way if you need to outsource the work you will be able to do so easily. If you decide to use a controlled vocabulary, make that as portable as possible so that other people can set up the same structure on their systems.

3. Keep your controlled vocabulary intuitive and avoid overly-complicated structures which will make inputting difficult and make the sturcture even more difficult to change. If you are a company with limited resources, buy a vocabulary off the internet or use just a few keywording rules to guide your inputting and avoid a controlled vocabulary completely.

4. Before you start, get as much information as you can about how long the project will take. Calculate the cost, then double it. If it still makes economic sense then proceed.

Setting Up Your Own Keywording Standard

2009-01-13T11:38:00.005+13:00

If you aren't keywording to a set standard such as Getty or Corbis you may well be using what we like to call an intuitive standard - trying to match keywords to what people will want to use intuitively rather than using words which plug in to someone else's keywording system or controlled vocabulary.

The problem is that libraries using such keywording often forget to have any sort of standard. Whilst it is normally impractical to put together a huge controlled vocabulary in which every word has a defined relationship with every other one, some simple rules can give you the sort of consistency and clarity you need so that clients can understand how your keywording works. If clients come across different ways of doing things they won't know what search terms to use, and may cross you off their research list because of the ongoing frustration.

When creating your own standard you need to address issues such as whether you want to always include plurals, or only when there are multiple instances of something in the image? When including a verb do you want to use the simple "kick" or "throw", or do you also want the present tense continuous variation "kicking" and "throwing".

Whatever you decide on, be sure to write it down, and use that as a basis for your staff to use, or for outsourced keywording companies to work into their systems. You can even include your standard in a research tips section on your web site.

Spell Words and Names Correctly and Avoid Confusion

2008-12-31T16:29:00.006+13:00

In an effort to make your images easy to find it's tempting to include common misspellings, but that's the start of a slippery slope.

The basic question you have to ask yourself is where does it end? Start with adding tryangle to triangle and pretty soon you'll be putting in sheeep as well as sheep and your keywording field will contain thousands of words, most of them spelled wrong.

There is a school of thought that aside from ordinary words, people's names can carry alternatives. But how do you get on when there are lots of common misconceptions about how a person's name is spelled? Take Hilton Hotel heiress and sometime celebrity Nicky Hilton. We've seen her name spelled by photographers in several different ways - Nicki, Nikki, Niki and Nikky to name the most common ones. Once you start including all those misspelling in your keywords how will researchers know what the right spelling is?

Our strong advice is to stick to the official spellings as much as possible because that will give you consistency. If researchers don't know how to spell triangle, they can go to a dictionary. If they don't know how to spell Nicky then they can look her up on Wikipedia.

Just as importantly, keeping control of your misspellings is a life's work. Whilst a misspelling dictionary doesn't exist you would need to maintain one, update it constantly and make sure all your keyworders/caption writers were aware of its intricacies.

The only exceptions to these rules are words where there are UK and US spellings, such as theatre and theater, or where someone's name has changed due to marriage or they are so widely known by an unofficial name that it would be ridiculous to only use their official title. Throughout much of her life, people knew Diana, Princess of Wales as Princess Diana. That wasn't her official name, but that's what most people called her.

Recession Survival Kit

2008-12-19T17:51:00.010+13:00

10 Ways To Use Better Workflow and Keywording To Beat a Slow Economy

Improved use of resources and clear thinking are essential for picture businesses to survive the economic downturn. Here are 10 ways you can utilise outsourced image workflow and keywording services to get your images to market, make more sales at lower cost and outperform your competitors.

1. Get a Better Ride On The Production Rollercoaster

Why is it you have to wait so long for an ice cream at the movies? It’s because even a cinema chain can’t afford to have enough staff to match the rush of people who turn up for the relatively infrequent movie session times. That’s one of the reasons multiplexes are a better financial bet than their predecessors, because they maximise the number of session times to justify having higher staff numbers to sell more food and drink.

Photo libraries have the same problem. Images don’t turn up in a constant stream. So you have to make a compromise about whether to be overstaffed to always have enough available to meet production and keywording needs, or be understaffed to save money which slows down production and harms sales. Outsourcing workflow and keywording can enable you to benefit, much like a multiplex cinema, by having a company handling workflow for a number of libraries so you can get images to market without blowing your wages budget.

2. Go 24/7 and Improve Sales Opportunities

If you haven’t already got a 24 hour, 7 day a week production flow how are you competing in hard times against bigger players who do (or at least get close)? While you’re asleep your competitors are getting the job done and making sales – sales you’ll never make. Outsourcing workflow and keywording can give you the 24/7 coverage you need without busting the bank.

3. Move Staff into Sales Where They Should Be

Got staff keywording, captioning, sending images with FTP? Chances are those people have got more talent in other areas where they would be better deployed. Outsource your workflow and keywording and get your staff where they should be when money is tight, making more sales, working on credit control or taking photos.

4. Match the Big Boys

In a tight economy the big players usually do well, or at least survive. Why is that? One reason is that they have enough resources not to have to hit the panic button and suddenly cut back on quality, time to market and other crucial elements that keep sales going. If sales are hard to come by, this is even more crucial and can mean the difference between survival and failure.
For smaller companies (and some big ones) cuts still need to be made in hours or jobs so often the only way to do this and still maintain sales momentum is to outsource workflow and keywording.

5. Save Your Sanity and Devote More time To Management

When the going gets tough, owners of smaller businesses will thrust themselves into the fray in an heroic effort to reduce labour costs with some DIY. Apart from the fact that such a strategy seriously devalues the worth of a business owner, he or she can quickly become overwhelmed with work. This is no way to live, and no way to run a business. How can you make clear decisions at a time when such decisions are needed more than ever, when you’re irritable and falling asleep at your computer?

Outsourcing workflow and keywording can enable you to take care of the day-to-day tasks with minimal employed labour while you concentrate on getting business done.

6. Avoid Costly Monitoring

Keeping systems running, production flowing and making money is a necessity, but how much of the cost is taken up with simply having people around to make sure things are going according to plan or in case something happens? This could be everyone from a middle manager, a supervisor or the person you have on at nights. Ask yourself if these people are really necessary. With outsourced workflow and keywording all those jobs can be matched to your production flow so you don’t have people in the office unnecessarily. Do the figures, and you may be surprised how much money you are paying.

7. Reduce Overheads

The amount spent on direct overheads such as power, rent, health insurance and so on is often underestimated when calculating the comparable costs of having staff or outsourcing. But there are bigger overheads associated with doing workflow and keywording in house: the costs of hiring, training, disciplining and organising your workers, not to mention the costs of unexpected absences and people quitting at just the wrong time.

Doing a full calculation of the cost of your present staffing could reveal that outsourcing workflow and keywording will bring you bigger savings than you had realised.

8. Turn Liabilities into Assets

When sales are more difficult to come by it is a waste to have money spent on obtaining and organising images only for people to have trouble finding them. Likewise, if times are tough it’s probably too costly to hire staff to do keywording. Even a limited amount of keywording and captioning done by a professional service on a per image basis can help you get extra dollars from those images you’ve worked so hard to bring into existence.

9. Positive PR

At a time when doom and gloom are the order of the day you can get some positive PR by announcing a new programme of keywording, better searchability or faster processes. Such information not only helps with picture buyers, it will show you that you’re on the ball and an attractive prospects for photographers looking for new representation in troubled times.

10. Expand the Business

Believe it or not, there are opportunities to expand during a financial downturn. In fact that’s when many of the more astute entrepreneurs do just that. If you know of another photo library which is struggling due to poor systems, a difficult-to- search archive, and over staffing you might be able to add profitable images to your library by merging, buying the archive (for a good price) or forming an alliance.

One of the principle problems with such moves is that the healthier company is faced with taking on staff and overhead costs and is unable to scale up offices and equipment quickly enough to make such an acquisition quickly and smoothly. Outsourcing can give such companies the sort of scalability they need within a short space of time, and enable them to realise labour savings as well.

Are You A Keyword Spammer?

2008-12-12T11:05:00.004+13:00

In an effort to make sales, it's obviously a good idea to have your images included in as many relevant search results as possible. However, you must be careful not to engage in what's known as "keyword spamming" - including every possible word that might apply to an image, no matter how tenuous.

In fact some people have been known to include words that have no relevance whatsoever to their images, much like webmasters trying to boost their search ranking with enormous amounts of metadata. These days Google and other search engines have ways to avoid such spamming.

In the image business, big libraries such as Getty and Corbis have limits and formulas (aka standards) which prevent people going overboard with their keywords - too many and the images will be rejected. That prevents their huge databases producing poor quality search results full of images of no value to the researcher.

When keywording for your own library,, where no such limits exist, it is tempting to throw the kitchen sink at the keywords field. I've heard it argued that for small libraries it doesn't matter if you go overboard because relatively few search results are generated so it doesn't take long to wade through them.

Even in that case I would question the advisability of keyword spamming, or anything approaching it. What message does it send about your professionalism if researchers type in the word banana and they get a lot of oranges?

Good keywording should be as focused as possible and differentiate your images, not lump them together for no good reason. As the saying goes, "a picture paints a thousand words" - just don't put all of them in the keyword field.

How Keywording Can Grow You a Long Tail

2008-12-05T16:53:00.004+13:00

As my old journalism lecturer once pointed out, the first word in news is new. It’s a point not lost on celebrity/news photo libraries which put great energy into selling the latest images at the highest possible prices.

However in doing so they may be ignoring a strategy to make them a significant profit and turn their archives from a liability into an asset, something only recently learned by their cousins in the music industry.

In 2004 Chris Anderson wrote an influential article in Wired magazine about The Long Tail. In a nutshell, he argued that as the cost of producing and holding products in the digital age became very low it was possible to make money from the least popular items.

His primary example was the change which had occurred in the music business as more and more titles were available through the likes of ITunes: back catalogues, obscure artists, “unpopular” genres.

For an industry obsessed with making money from chart-topping songs , the most astounding thing was that the number of sales of the less popular material was significant, in fact threatening to eclipse the money being made from the big hits.
Anderson illustrated this “New Marketplace” like this:

The Long Tail was the section of the graph which illustrated that the more products you could afford to offer, the more sales you made overall, to the extent that sales from the tail probably never reached zero. So whilst sales of the most popular songs at the head were impressive, because the long tail went on virtually endlessly they could end up being the most important part of the graph.

Anderson pointed out that in the days of the record store, when adding space required building stores at great cost, stores which could serve only a limited local population, the tail was stubby and relatively unimportant. No savvy music store owner would give up shelf space to an obscure folk band when the same space could be taken up by the latest hit record by Elton John or the Eagles. With the internet all that changed, making the Long Tail a reality. With the digital age it became wise to offer as many choices as possible, and watch the money roll in.

The editorial photo business shares many similarities with the music industry in regards to the Long Tail story: focus on the newest images and the biggest names, large back catalogues of content, the change from physical items (transparencies) to digital (jpegs).

The trick, of course, is to enable buyers to find the content they want as easily as possible. For the music industry this is relatively easy given that even a major artist might produce only a dozen albums, maybe 120 songs, in a lifetime.

At a single photo library that same major artist, Madonna say, can “generate” dozens of images or more per day.

To keep our music industry glasses on for a little longer, imagine if Madonna had produced 10,000 songs and as a buyer there was only one you wanted. Imagine also that the search engine at I-Tunes restricted searches to the name of the artist, and results were returned in random order, 24 on each page. How many people would spend the time or have the stamina to go through all 10,000 songs to find the right one?

It sounds far-fetched, but this is the equivalent of what many celebrity photo libraries ask their clients to do, because the available research tools deliver results based almost completely around the name of the celebrity, (usually from the caption field) and not much else.

Imagine the same hunt for a Madonna song where you could just put the name of the song straight in, or if you didn’t know the name of it perhaps the type of song it was, what year it came from, its subject or part of the title.

That’s what can be achieved if a celebrity/editorial archive is infused with quality keywording – a much better searching experience and the opportunity of up-selling or cross-selling.

The even better news is that the same keywording can improve sales of new and recent images by providing searchability ahead of competitors and even allowing researchers to find the big money shot that somehow got lost in the other 20,000 images of Madonna sitting on the server.
To start making money from the Long Tail, photo libraries can take a few approaches depending on their circumstances: keywording the archive en masse, strategically keywording the parts of the archive thought most valuable (although this to some extent contrary to the idea of the Long Tail), or adopting a conveyor-belt approach. The conveyor belt is where a photo library elects at a certain point to keyword all new production, thus gaining the benefit of searchability for new and old alike, constantly adding value to the archive and turning it from a dormant liability taking up space on servers , into a growing revenue earner.

For some, this may require a change of thinking about the importance of research and how to make it easier.

For the bigger photo libraries it is now commonplace to limit the number of results from research to say the first 2,000 pictures. On the web that has some operational advantages, but is really an indictment on the keywording/research strategy, as such limits prune the Long Tail and reduce revenue. Much better to be able to refine a search to get a manageable number of results and see all the images which are relevant.

It is likely that the photo libraries which manage to utilise the Long Tail will be the survivors in the content wars of the 21st Century – not just because of the direct sales made, but because of the overall convenience to picture buyers wanting to limit the number of libraries they visit amongst the multitudes.

In the music industry, the success of I-Tunes’ huge searchable selection has made it a market leader. In the picture business some would argue that Getty Images and a few others are on the same track, something which should give every photo library owner pause for thought.

Dangerous Metadata

2008-12-04T10:45:00.011+13:00

With editorial images there is a large opportunity to get into trouble with inappropriate keywording and captioning, particularly the latter. Apart from the obviously embarassing gaffes of referring to a famous person as a man when they’re a woman, getting their age radically wrong and so on, there is a much more serious problem of defamation.

Such difficulties normally don’t arise with model-released stock, but where you are adding metadata to images of recognisable people, suggestions that they are drunk (or any euphamisms such as “tired and emotional”) with a girlfriend not their wife or guilty of a crime, you could find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit. That is especially so if a throwaway line put into the caption by the photographer gets picked up and turned into a story by a client receiving the image.

The bottom line is that you should take the same amount of care about photo captions as you would about a news story. Our suggestion is that because the fighting talk should remain the domain of the journalists writing their stories it’s best to go down a very conservative line when suggesting anything derogatory.
If outsourcing captioning it is important that the company or individual doing the work has some guidelines in place at the very least.

Is it a Bird, Is it a Plane, or is it (gulp) a Caption

2008-12-01T08:47:00.005+13:00

Less tends to be more when it comes to writing good captions, at least if you are going to keep the caption field searchable.

There is so much potentially-useful information in a caption that it is a pity to leave that out of searchable fields, particularly for news and celebrity images. The trouble is that this field is often seen as a license to produce literature.

The theory is that by giving a lot of background and extra detail you can make an image more saleable. The typical thing is to reference that someone has just broken up with their girlfriend, list the movies the person has just starred in or give a general (and lengthy) account of what occurred at the event.

Quite a lot of that information becomes very dated very quickly, but more importantly by adding so many extra words the image is much more likely to come up in searches for totally unrelated people and things. The worst we've seen was a caption used on a large set of images from the television benefit for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In each caption the photographer included the name of everyone performing in the benefit, not just the person shown in the frame. So every time you searched for images of Jennifer Aniston you would get pictures of everyone else who performed - not exactly ideal.

Our suggestion is that if you want to make the caption into a news story you try using another field such as notes.

For captions, try to keep them succinct and name only things relevant to the frame such as the person or things that can be seen, the location and so on.

PLUS Adopted By Major Publishers

2008-12-01T08:42:00.003+13:00

Three major publishers have called for the adoption of the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) standards by picture archives, photographersand all other image suppliers.

Representatives of McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,and Pearson each announced that they will adopt the PLUS Picture Licensing Glossarydefinitions in their contracts, and that they encourage image suppliers to begin embedding PLUS license metadata in all images within one year. The publishers voiced their support at the “PLUS Takes Root in the Publishing Industry” event hosted by the Picture Archive Councilof America, during their International Conference in New York City.

The PLUS standards were developed by the PLUS Coalition, an international non-profit organization dedicated to simplifying and facilitating the communication and management of image rights. In the PLUS Coalition, publishers, picture archives,photographers, illustrators, designers, advertising agencies, museums, libraries, artist representatives, educational institutions, manufacturers and their associations collaboratetoward that shared goal. The PLUS standards allow rights and attribution information totravel within image files in a machine-readable format that provides instant access and universal understanding.

“We are very pleased that these major publishers – the largest image licensees in the industry – are aligned in their support of the PLUS standards,” said Maria Kessler, President of the Picture Archive Association of America.

Bonnie Beacher, Senior Director of Contracts, Copyrights and Permissions at McGraw-HillEducation, said “The PLUS standards benefit publishers and their suppliers by simplifying and clarifying the process of licensing and managing images. We are in the process of implementing PLUS standards, and we would find it very useful for our image suppliers to adopt PLUS standards as well.”

Jeff Sedlik, President & CEO of the PLUS Coalition, said “The PLUS standards will allowpublishers to leverage embedded license metadata to increase automation and more efficiently manage images in their digital asset management systems.”

The PLUS Coalition includes participants in thirty countries, and receives significant support from Leadership Circle members Adobe, Adbase, Adobe, Pentagram, Jupiterimages,Digimarc, Belay Development, Getty Images, IDEAlliance, ImageSpan, Photo District News,IPTC, NAPP, PACA, StockPhotoFinder, Swan Turton, WongDoody and Capture.

To learn more about PLUS, click here

Post courtesy of www.photoarchivenews.com

Some Tips To Get You Started

2008-11-24T17:29:00.006+13:00

Here's a few tips to help your keywording process:

Understand Your Search Mechanism - Think about how users, including your own staff, will actually use your archive. Do searches allow for criteria such as "and" or "not"? Are those search criteria used in reality or do people simply opt for the quick-search window? This can have a major bearing on what keywords you should construct and how many you need to put in. Alternatively, you might consider improving your search mechanism to make better use of your keywords.
Work Out An Appropriate Keywording Formula - Get your research staff together to talk over what searches they actually do, and what searches they and your clients have trouble completing effectively because of a lack of keywords. Much of this will depend on the sorts of images you hold. A fashion archive would be likely to require far greater detail, and a much wider vocabulary, to describe the clothing of photo subjects, than would a sports agency. If possible, enlist the help of people with experience in keywording to help you work through such issues as whether to include alternative spellings and whether to adopt an industry standard or controlled vocabulary.
Get To Know The Crucial Keywording Standards - If submitting to the likes of Getty or Corbis it's imperative to understand their keywording standards, including what words are preferred, and relevant character limits. Get these wrong and your images could be rejected.
Make Your Keywording As Consistent As Possible - The best keywording vocabulary and policies are of no use unless you can make sure they are followed. The work should be done by staff specifically trained and designated for the task. Software which organises the process is a huge advantage. Do not leave it up to photographers.
Harmonise Captions With Keywords - If the caption and keywords fields are both being searched, try to stop the caption sabotaging the keywords by adding in words which mislead researchers, such as mentions of people not visible in the picture.

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

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%