Stock House Thursdays: The Introduction
Far and away, the biggest mistake a photographer can make when it comes to keywording images for stock houses is to assume that once they learn how to do it at one stock house, they know how to do it for all of them.
Unfortunately, forums and blogs are filled with these well-meaning photographers who have successfully learned the ins and outs of one particular stock house, have anointed themselves masters of keywording, and are spreading “facts” that may be true at one site, but not true at others.
Each stock photography agency out there with a website will have its own set of standards for how to keyword the images you submit to them, and some are much better at giving clear guidelines than others. And without naming names, I’ve found two that give incorrect advice (albeit minor) on how best to keyword your images for them.
Keywording standards are based upon two prime factors. The first is, which of the scores of commercial database tools they are using and what settings have they chosen (assuming they haven’t built theirs from scratch). This is then combined with which of the hundreds of search engines they are using.
This means that there is NO chance, for the time being, that one single set of standards will apply to all stock houses. In fact, odds are very good that if you draw 5 stock houses out of a hat, all five will have different systems in place.
These differences are important to know and understand, to ensure that you are getting maximum exposure by providing the best keywords for any individual stock house. So without any further ado, here are the ten main differences in no particular order, as doing any one of them wrong will decrease the visibility of your images at your stock house.
10. Plurals
Do you need to keyword both boy and boys? What about non-standard pluralizations, such as man and men or knife and knives? Some stock houses can do standard, but not the non-standard plurals.
9. Synonyms
Do they have a thesaurus built in or do you need to keyword both sofa and couch, or boy, male child, childhood, kid, and lad?
8. Variant spellings
Should you keyword closeup, close-up and close up, if you want to be found in each search? Or can you keyword just one, and the image will be found by a search for either of them?
7. The tab delimiter
Do you need a comma, semicolon or a space between each of your keywords when submitting?
6. Format and Type
Does the stock house have a separate field for these, or should you be keywording horizontal, vertical, panorama or square? What about color image, sepia or black and white? You better use these as keywords if they don’t.
5. Phrases
Does your stock house preserve your keyword phrases? What happens if you submit salt and pepper shakers, dish, tablecloth, table cloth? Do the phrases stay together or do you end up with and, cloth, dish, pepper, salt, table, tablecloth?
4. Verb forms
Does their search engine know that frustrating, frustrated, frustrate and frustrates all mean the same thing? Or do you need to keyword each in order to be found by each search?
3. Punctuation
How do they deal with hyphens, apostrophes and periods within your keywords. For instance, a few houses search engines treat hyphens as a NOT in the search, i.e. a search at that site for “close-up” is treated like “close NOT up” and will never find your keyword close-up.
2. Keyword Weight
Do they actually give more weight to certain keywords than others? Answer: probably not, other than Alamy, very few do.
1. Number of Keywords Allowed
Is there a maximum number of keywords, words or characters allowed?
A quick bit of math: if each of these ten has only two options (several have more) that would mean there are 1,024 different combinations of these requirements.
You have your homework. Have you been submitting your keywords to your particular stock houses most effectively?
Wouldn’t it be great if there was one website that had all this information,neatly organized, so you could quickly figure out just what you needed to do for each stock house? It sure would, but unfortunately this web site doesn’t yet exist.
There are a lot of stock houses. Right now I have a list of 513, and I know that I’m missing hundreds, if not thousands, of niche microstock houses.
So my plan is that, starting this week, I will do a thorough evaluation of 1 stock house per week.
- Part 1: How Shutterstock.com Handles Keywords.
- Part 2: Image Keywording for 123rf.com
- Part 3: Image Keywording for Alamy.com
