Community Expert

Question

Keywording Curiosity

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 25, 2022
3 replies
421 views

To sell photos, the photos have to be useable and they have to be found. I can supply the useable photo. Having it found is something else. After all, I am competing with 100s of thousands of other contributors. They have watched the same videos and have read the same documents that I have. I need the cutting edge to make my photos jump to the top.

I have posted here a couple of times to try to awaken your intrest, but nobody wants to take part.

Here another little curiosity that I discovered:

All searches for region USA.

1. The search for "snow covered trees grass field" returned 107,568 results. That is quite alot. My photo was position 24 which is also okay for me.

2. The next search was for "snow covered trees in grass field" which only 9,963 results. That is quite a difference to search number 1. The only difference was including the prepersition of "in" in the search term. This time, my photo was position 20 which is not muh better. But there is less competition.

Photo title:

snow covered trees in a grass field with pigeons on the ground and snowflakes in the air with a grey sky.

Photo Keywords:

snow, snowy, tree, weather, snow covered, field, grass, in, high key, nature, bird, white, bright, beautiful, background, landscape, natural, outdoor, outdoors, scene, scenery, scenic, artistic, art, fine art, winter, cold, frost, frosty, ice, icy, season, seasonal, foggy, pigeon, ground, branches, leaves, snowflakes, rural, frozen

Any ideas? Any thoughts?

Should prepersitions be used in keywording?

What would a buyer use for searching? Words or sentences?

Contributors

This topic has been closed for replies.

Abambo

Community Expert

The question is: where would your picture land without in in your keywords, but with in in the search phrase.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

RALPH_L

Author

Community Expert

My photos keywords shown above were after I entered the keyword "in". After adding "in" into my top 10 keywords, my photo moved up to position number "15"! It took about two hours for the servers cache to update.

That means that prepositions in the title and in the keyword list are used in ranking if the searcher uses these words as search terms.

Youre welcome. Please share any findings that you might have.

Jill_C

Community Expert

I'm no expert on how Buyers search for images, but I'm assuming that it's not common to use prepositions in search terms because it's generally not important whether something is "in" or "on" something else. However, I do use prepositions and articles in my titles, but I don't put them in the keyword list.

Jill C., Forum Volunteer

R

Robert McAlpine

Inspiring

Logically speaking, the role of key words is to REDUCE the number of images that meet the criteria the buyer has entered. Entering a preposition or a article actually EXPANDS the number of target images. To me that means that whoever wrote the search algorithm would ask it to ignore all articles and prepositions. I really don't understand why your second search returned the results it did.

R

Robert McAlpine

Inspiring

You are bringing up good points that I am sure we have all thought about when we are trying to come up with the optimum key words that will connect our picture to a buyer. Being a sensational photographer is only part of the problem in Stock Photography - if you don't select words that connect you to buyers, your sensaational work langusihes amongst millions of other photographs.

I was under the impression that seach algorithms take out prepositions and articles; but clearly that did not happen in your example and I am surprised by that. Also I was under the impression that having too many words included in your search just meant that the algorithm selected a truncated set of words and the words selected might not be key words that put your image in the first 50 or so images.

I am not a buyer of images so I have no personal experience that that end of Stock Photography. But I would be surprised if buyers looked at more than the first 100 or so images in making their selection. That means that as a contributor, your selection of key words is even more important than your skill as a photographer.

It is rather frustrating when you are especially proud of an image to realize that unless you are cleaver about the key words you choose, no one will ever see your fabulous creation. Being a skilled photographer is only half of the game in selling Stock Images.

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