"black and white" keyword

Question

Good morning.

I'm planning on doing a major overhaul of my keywords in AS. I have decided to start on the pictures which have 0 sales, or the older ones (since the other ones are being found by customers). Out of those, and otherwise quite randomly, I have selected the following ID: 95176347 . Just for fun, I have decided to check in the search results how far down the algorithm this picture was being placed. Since a few keywords weren't enough to give me short results (this is, after all, a very famous building), I have decided to use many keywords, and still, I wasn't being able to find my picture (ONLY using keywords, not the title or description).

After many attempts, including searching for ALL of my keywords at the same time ("architecture, art, black and white, budapest, danube, dome, government, hungary, parliament, towers") to no avail, I have determined that it was the keyword "BLACK AND WHITE" the one to blame. Indeed, after removing that one, I was able to get to my picture. I have tried the exact same scenario with the ID 95176430 and the same thing happens. To further support my case, I have even searched for the keyword "black and white" in my own portfolio, and have found only very limited results - only 11 pictures truly "black and white", while I probably have many dozens of them like that.

In conclusion, it seems that my portfolio is not being correctly targeted for a keyword that, I thought, was an important one as far as keywords go. So my questions are: is the keyword "black and white" somehow reserved in the search algorithm, or treated differently? And if so, which are the OTHER reserved keywords? If this is only a problem of "lack of historical indexing" (those pictures are from 2015), then can you please re-trigger the indexing? Please help me address this issue, or at least have more knowledge about this, before I do any metadata overhaul at all.

Thank you.

Bruno Coelho

WendellaBee · Accepted Answer

Hi @Bruno Coelho,Thank you for this feedback. I have passed this on the Adobe Stock team and received this information from our product management team:This specific phrase is a tricky one because it is a phrase with an English stopword _and_.  Search drops stopwords, so unless the contributor also has _black_ as a tag and _white_ as a tag, the “black and white” tag does not get surfaced. However, if a customer uses the quotes in their search _”black and white”_ then the content will surface as the quotes tell us it’s a phrase and the stopword is not dropped. As a note, this is only an issue when you do the search in English – for instance, in French and German the phrase appears just fine without quotes.https://stock.adobe.com/fr/search/images?k=noir+et+blanc+95176347https://stock.adobe.com/de/search/images?k=schwarzweiß+95176347 In the scenarios where a stop word is part of the phrase, it is advisable to have both tags separately, in this case _black_ and _white_, as well as the phrase so it can surface for the translations. Where phrases don’t contain stop words, there are no issues. Moving this post to https://community.adobe.com/t5/stock-contributors/bd-p/Stock-Contributors

Bruno Coelho · Answer

Good afternoon.

I appreciate all your responses, and indeed the next day I had created this thread I figured all those things out as well: I was using "black and white" thinking it was a keyword in itself (as I describe it in metadata), and not that it's the conjunction of "black" AND "white" (as usually, search engines do). Using "black and white" (meaning, with the actual quotes) gives me the expected results. Also, because usually the platform appears to me in Portuguese by default, I quickly realized that "preto e branco" (without quotes here) offered better results, because "e" isn't treated as a connector as the English "and" is.

This knowledge now allows me to correctly face the metadata corrections I need to do in my portfolio.

However, I still wonder:

1) If the average buyer / consumer knows about the stopword special treatment, and they use "black and white" in quotes in order to actually get "black and white", and if the average contributor knows about this as well. It seems to me that this "lack of etiquette" leaves out a lot of black and white results, and even if black and white content isn't optimally desired in stock photography, we cannot hide the importance that this concept has in photography in general. Maybe AS should do the exact opposite of what I initially meant, i.e. actually create an exception for this expression (and any others in which it's considered that "and" plays an important part of the query term).

2) Yes, I'm aware that black and white content isn't desired in stock photography, and in the last months (when I started focusing on editorial as well) I have stopped submitting b&w to stock photography. Unfortunately, due to AS's strict spam policy, I am afraid of resubmitting conversions of b&w to color of my existing content, because I've been warned twice already, so I'm simply trying to get the most of the content I already have accepted (and for that particular shot, I also have a color variation actually).

Again, thanks for following this up with me.

Bruno Coelho

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