In the Field: Photo Blog by Richard Wong

Photography field reports by Richard Wong. Richard’s work has been published in magazines, books, advertising, and offers fine art prints of his work. Images may be licensed as rights-managed stock photos by contacting Richard directly at Richard@rwongphoto.com or (626) 422-6151. California stock photography, fine art prints, photo blog: www.rwongphoto.com

Photo Keywording Strategy

Posted on | September 3, 2007 | 10 Comments

Stock photographers complain all the time about how dreadful keywording is and how it is the worst aspect of the profession. Well this article is not about that. I actually kind of enjoy keywording. Coming up with a sufficient amount of relevant keywords per image requires some creative thinking (apparently going to school does pay off in some subjects later on in real life.) I like challenges and liken keywording to a crossword puzzle.

Proper keywording is essential to selling stock photography nowadays. Without good keywording skills you would be hard pressed to sell anything through stock photo agencies because the industry has gone mostly digital in the past several years. Keywords can also help make your life as a photographer easier because it would allow you to find your own images in a database easier. Keeping track of and finding all of your images is easy if you only have a few hundred marketable images but when you have thousands of images like most pros then it is easy to forget images when one is pressed for time if one doesn’t have an efficient filing system set up. In this article, I will describe what I was thinking about as I keyworded the following image and offer my opinion as to what is necessary in order to keyword a photo properly.

Louisville Bats versus Norfolk Tides AAA Minor League Baseball Game, Louisville, Kentucky Photo: Louisville Bats versus Norfolk Tides AAA Minor League Baseball Game, Louisville, Kentucky

The most obvious keywords for any location shoot image should be geographic location so here are a few that immediately come to mind for this photo: Slugger Field, Louisville, Kentucky, southern, south, USA, United States of America. Personally I tend to leave the United States keywords out because I only shoot U.S. locations and I shoot very location-specific subject matter. If a photo researcher doing were to do an online stock photo search for a Kentucky tourism article or brochure, they’d likely type in something like “Louisville minor league baseball” or “Louisville team sports”, which is more than sufficient to bring up the necessary images since the odds of a Hungarian photo researcher needing my images from Kentucky are highly unlikely. Secondly, minor league baseball is generally thought of as an American sport, so it is unlikely that anyone would do a search on stock site for, “USA minor league baseball teams”. Now if I were keywording for a location such as Niagara Falls or San Francisco, of which the country of origin could be of multiple countries, then the need for country identifying would be more necessary. In this case however, since baseball is an integral part of American culture and history I decided to include the country identifier keywords since the images could be used in a broader sense than just the sport of baseball.

Once the location keywords have been determined, what next? Subject matter is another area in which one should explore for keywords. For sure, some images are more conducive to a high quantity of keywords than others say compare this baseball image with a general postcard scenic image of mountain such as Mount Shasta. There’s only a few relevant ways you can describe the Mount Shasta picture to be of any use to the photo researcher, whereas the baseball image can fit into multiple different image category genres such as lifestyle, travel, sports, inspirational, etc… For the baseball image for example here are just a few keywords to scratch the surface: hitter, hitters, hitting, batter, batters, bat, bats, batting, athlete, athletics, athletes. Knowing some historical information on your subject matter would be very helpful as well.

Synonyms: Every person has their own personal photo search style, so one should always include the singular and plural forms of the words in addition to synonyms of terminology that one might realistically use to find your image. One person might type in “Kentucky baseball pitching” whereas someone else might find my photo by typing in “minor leaguers tossing baseballs in the south”, so it would be to your best interest to include as many relevant forms of the terms as possible.

Vernacular: Be mindful of how your target market speaks because the terminology that they use might not be the same as yours. Slang to one person might be everyday speech to another. For example, my college roommate was from Idaho and never could understand what I was talking about when I said “soda” or “market” because he knew them as “pop” and “grocery store”. Knowing that linguistic insight, I would include those variations of the terms despite the fact that I would probably not use those same words myself in a conversation. Keywording strategy is all about covering the necessary bases.

Description keywords: This category of keywords describes the concept of your image. While not absolutely mandatory for most images that I shoot, it could be beneficial to include these words anyway. To describe the baseball image, I could add keywords such as “determination, fortitude, reflexes, competition, competitors, etc…” For regular model-released lifestyle type stock imagery though, these sorts of keywords can make or break you financially. If you aren’t good at coming up with descriptory keywords for that type of imagery then chances are you will sell nothing because lifestyle images are all about illustrating a concept. If I were a “lifestyle” photographer, then I’d probably pay a professional keyword specialist to keyword my images since this category of keywords is the most difficult to do effectively.

How many words are too much?: There has been a lot of debate over this since Alamy rolled out their new “Alamy Rank” image search engine prioritizing system a few months ago. Questions one must consider are: Are these keywords diluting the impact of my essential keywords? If so, is it worth leaving this keyword in at the potential risk of receiving a lower rank for a more important keyword? Does the stock agency put a cap on the amount of keywords that I can include per image, if so, then which words should I leave out?

There’s no way for anyone else to answer these questions for you because no one really knows the answers to these questions. My theory is that it’s best to know how your photos might be used and base your keyword strategy off of that assumption. For me, I’d rather just stay modest and not get too cute with every word in the dictionary if no one is likely to use those words. On the other hand, I see some photographers that will stuff 500 keywords into every image. I don’t know what other photographers are selling on Alamy, but my Alamy gross sales in the past year is almost $5 per number of images on average, which is higher than the commonly assumed standard of $1 per number of images annual average.

Keywording is not a rocket science so there’s no need to go Shakespeare to find keywords your images. All it takes is some common sense and a little understanding in how your images are used. Anyways, I’ve blabbed on for long enough so here are the keywords that I came up with for the minor league baseball photo.

Keywords: Louisville Bats; AAA Minor League Baseball; teams; team; sports; sport; sporting; America’s Favorite Pastime; Louisville; Kentucky; Kentuckiana; South; southern; USA; United States of America; Norfolk Tides; Slugger Field; pitcher; pitching; pitch; ball; balls; bat; batting; batter; batters; umpire; umpires; umpiring; catcher; catchers; catch; catching; infield; infield; field diamond; diamonds; grass; grass; backstop; back stop; stops; backstops; people; player; players; man; men; athlete; athletes; athletics; hand-eye coordination; compete; competitors; competitor; competition; competing; anticipate; anticipation; anticipating; reflex; reflexes; determined; determination; hitters; hitter; minor leaguer; minor leaguers; tossing;
toss; tosses; flamethrower; flamethrowers; fireballers; fireballer; speed; fast; quick; speedy; quickly

Try to enjoy your next keyword session. ;-)

Category: Technique
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Comments

10 Responses to “Photo Keywording Strategy”

  1. bernie kasper
    September 4th, 2007 @ 3:52 pm

    Wonderful article and information Richard, just the type of info I need if I ever to try this as a profession. You seem to be able to convey your knowledge much better than many others on the net, it really helps a novice like me to understand better.

  2. Richard
    September 4th, 2007 @ 8:34 pm

    Thanks Bernie. I try my best to separate my emotion from stuff like this and post useful material on my blog whether it is keywording or field reports because you never know who might actually want to learn about or be entertained by this stuff. I could probably edit my blog better though to be more clear as I pretty much just write it all spur of the moment.

  3. Gary Crabbe
    September 4th, 2007 @ 8:50 pm

    You forgot “GAME”.

    Not so easy, huh?

    Nicely written piece, though.

    Cheers, :)

    Gary.

  4. Richard
    September 4th, 2007 @ 10:24 pm

    Thanks Gary, I was hoping somebody would pick out some words that I missed. 80 keywords and still missing some obvious ones, lol.

  5. Sherri Meyer
    September 5th, 2007 @ 7:59 am

    Very well written Richard!

    Sherri

  6. Richard
    September 5th, 2007 @ 10:11 pm

    Thanks Sherri!

  7. Jim Goldstein
    September 5th, 2007 @ 10:37 pm

    Nice write up. This topic has been bouncing around in the back of my mind for sometime. Given your copy writing background I’d think you’d have a leg up in this area. Too funny about the missed word “game”. I always find a word or two missing the next day. Murphy’s Law :)

    Very informative article. I’ll have to reread this later as I look to revisit my current image submissions.

  8. Richard
    September 5th, 2007 @ 11:21 pm

    game, games, ballgame, ballgames. A while back when I couldn’t get keywords out of my mind, I even got my mom hooked on suggesting keywords for my images with singular and plurals.

    some of my earlier keyword attempts from a few years ago are inadequately keyworded as well. would probably be in my best interest to go back and update those.

  9. Paul Indigo
    November 1st, 2007 @ 4:05 pm

    Good thorough article and best of all you manage to convey enthusiasm for the task which gives the rest of us a bit of boost.
    Cheers,
    Paul

  10. Richard
    November 1st, 2007 @ 4:49 pm

    Thanks Paul. I agree, one could let the drudgery dominate their mindset or they could learn to embrace it because keywording isn’t going away regardless of how the photographer feels.

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