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Microstock photography involves taking photos, keywording these photos so that buyers can find them, and then submitting them for review. Whlist some microstock photography sites will help you by actually editing your keywords for you, others may give you a warning, or suspend (or even terminate!) your account if your keywords are misleading or inappropriate.
The importance of good keywording practice should not be underestimated, and an appropriate amount of time should be taken when keywording photos. Most microstock photography websites offer two methods for keywording photos:
- Keyword after you upload, whilst online.
- Keyword before you upload (recommended)
Avoid keywording JPEG images in photoshop for each time you save and resave a JPEG, you run the risk of adding noise, artifacts or additional compression to your photo. You could use photoshop to open RAW files for keywording, and then save your photos as JPEG images, but most microstock photographers use a program like PixVue to keyword photos. After installing PixVue, using windows explorer simply right click an image, and choose: ANNOTATE > EDIT to bring up PixVue's keywording options.
TITLE: Keep it short. Minimum of 7 words. Include some of your main keywords here as some microstock photography sites do take keywords in the title into account when a search is performed. Some dont. Assume they do.
AUTHOR: As far as I am aware, on all microstock photography websites it is acceptable to put your name in the author field (but not in the keywords).
DESCRIPTION: Keep it short, simply describe the subject in the photo. Treat this as another opportunity to insert a few of your main keywords. Phrases such as "isolated over white" and "isolated on white" and "macro" and "close up" should be entered here (as well as in the keywords field)
TIP: Photo reviewers reject photos if they feel they have little or no commercial value. Whether or not your photos are accepted or declined, does sometimes depend on the reviewer, his mood and what he ate for breakfast. A stock photo of a pile of stones might be described as "Conceptual pile of stones, representing balance or planning." A technique like this wont help get bad photos accepted, but it may help prevent good photos from sometimes being rejected.
COPYRIGHT STATUS: The Copyright Notice and Copyright URL fields should also be left blank. Shutterstock does not permit photographers to place copyright notices within photos. You have two choices: 1) Never enter the copyright info. 2) Check the rules on the various sites and enter your details when appropriate. I never fill out this field, I follow one set of rules for all sites which saves me time.
KEYWORDS: There is much debate on what is best, and why. Some sites let you add up to 70 keywords, others only 50. If you follow one set of rules which are compatible with all sites, you will save yourself not only time, but a great deal of hassle. I use 50 keywords max, and I keyword my photos before I upload them.
Remember this next rule, for some microstock photography sites MAY suspend your account if you break it. Do not use keywords such as "sexy" or "nude" together with other keywords like "teen" even if the model is of legal age.
Some sites still display images in order of 'most sales ever' which means the older photos have the advantage. Other sites now display images in order of 'sales per day, on average" giving both old and new photos equal exposure.
Is more keywords better? Opinions vary! Some sites weight your first keywords as being more important than your last ones, in order. There are a few sites which give priority in the search results to photos that have fewer keywords. How much priority? Hopefully not too much. They have to ensure the best selling photos are not penalised too heavily for having more keywords, or sale figures will suffer for them as well as for us. They want to make sale too.
I predict that we will see an increase in the number of sites using an intelligant keyword search/click/sale analysis algorythms which will weight the importance of each keyword differently for each image, and help buyers by displaying the most relevant images first. If a buyer searches for "onion" and photos of 'single onions' always tend to be purchased, more weight will be given to those onions for the keyword "onion" rather than the countless dishes of food which 'contain' onion.
I often see images with 7 keywords ranking first. Partly because a photo is worth 1000 words, good photos speak for themselves. But equally, if someone needed a photo of a hamburger, keywords such as burger, hamburger and cheeseburger would probably account for 50% of the sales, whilst the other 47 keywords might make up the other 50%. Nothing beats having a good photo in the first place!
Buyers are not image lovers, who are addicted to buying photos as a hobby in life. Buyers are usually employees working for design companies, working under pressure and to deadlines, with specific tasks that need to be achieved. They usually know exactly what types of images they need on a given day, so help them by choosing keywords which accurately describe and relate to your photo.
I can only summarise by saying that more keywords is better, but only if your keywords are all good. Bear in mind the fact that some sites (like shutterstock again, for example) let buyers download 25 images a day for a monthly fee. Buyers are usually large companies, and designers tend to buy images they like, even if the image isnt one they need on that particular day. In these scenarios, more keywords is also better.
Use a thesaurus (SHIFT F7 in Microsoft Word) but don't use erroneous keywords which people simply are not going to type in. "Big spider" is far more relevant than "outsized arthropod". Look at other peoples keywords. Delete the irrelevant ones and before you finish, spend a few moments trying to improve on what you have, because the odds are that you usually can.
Never use town, city or place names, unless the photo is a good representaion of the location itself. A female model on an excercise bike in a gymnasium in London should not contain the keyword London, for the gymnasium could be located anywhere in the world. If she was riding a real bike across tower bridge, then of course the keyword london could be used. Use keywords such as "interior" and exterior when submitting images of buildings, this also helps buyers.
KEBATCHING is keywording batches of photos using the same set of keywords. No one enjoys keywording, and it is easier to cut a list down than it is to build one up. You will save time by learning to save and re-use keywords, but ensure that the irrelevant ones are deleted and replaced with more appropriate keywords.
PLURAL: Most microstock photogaphy sites have functionality which ensures your images come up when someone searches for the plural version of your keywords. Although this is usually the case, they all work differently, and dont always work all that well. Use the case sensitivity which best representats your photo. For example, shrimp is better than shrimps, because the word shrimp is more commonly used.
When uploading photos, keywords are sometimes lost in transition. No one knows why, and this seems to happen on all of the microstock photography sites, as if at random. Upload batches of the same series of photos together, so you can copy/paste keywords from other images if needed.
Whilst keywording is important, no amount of work will help a bad photo do well.
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