Stock House Thursdays: Dreamstime
Following up last week’s analysis of AgeFotoStock.com, I will now take an in depth look at how Dreamstime.com handles keywords.
These aren’t really “reviews,” in that they will have no thumbs up or down at the end. This is not intended to be a recommendation or otherwise about any of the stock houses I will analyze. Most of the elements I’m looking at don’t necessarily have an objective right or wrong answer. The only thing that really matters is that the photographer know the correct way to keyword for the individual stock house.
If you haven’t read my introductory post for this series, on the various ways stock houses differ in their keyword standards, you probably should read 10 Ways that Stock Houses can be different in their Keywording Standards first.
I hope to provide an in depth look at how stock houses deal with keywords, and how their search engine works in order to give their contributors a complete set of requirements so that they can keyword their images get maximum exposure at the site.
For those of you with some gumption, you should read the complete introduction and methods behind these analyses: The Methodology Behind the Analysis.
DREAMSTIME:
Plurals:
- Result: Dreamstime returned different results for each set of keyword searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include the plural form of any of your keywords.
Synonyms:
- Result: Dreamstime returned different results for each set of keyword searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all appropriate synonyms for your keywords.
Variant Spellings:
- Result: Dreamstime returned different results for every one of theses keyword searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all appropriate variant spellings for your keywords.
Verb Forms:
- Result: Dreamstime returned different results for every one of theses keyword searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all forms of verbs as keywords.
Other Forms of the Word:
- Result: Dreamstime returned different results for every form of each word.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all forms of any word.
Phrases:
- Dreamstime appears to break every keyword phrase into individual keywords. Every search for the variations of wooden and chair returned the same results. Except for the searches in quotes returned 0 results.
- Prognosis: Keyword phrases do not exist as far as Dreamstime is concerned. Every word is considered an individual word and order of words is irrelevant.
Words in a Keyword Phrase:
- Result: Dreamstime returned fewer results for the individual words than the phrase.
- Prognosis: As we already figured out, Dreamstime only uses individual keywords, no keyword phrases, so this test is unnecessary.
Prepostitions:
- Result: Dreamstime appears to allow prepositions as keywords, but ignores them in searches.
- Prognosis: It appears that you do not need to include prepositions in any of your keyword phrases.
Periods:
- Result: Dreamstime recognizes periods as valid search characters in searches, however I couldn’t find any periods in keywords attached to images.
- Prognosis: You can not include periods in any of your keywords. However, because their search engine does recognize periods, make sure you have appropriate periods in your titles and descriptions as the search engine searches them as well.
Hyphens:
- Result: Dreamstime appears to treat hyphens as a blank space in searches, and I couldn’t find any hyphenated words in any of their images
- Prognosis: You can not include hyphens in any of your keywords.
Apostrophes:
- Result: Dreamstime recognizes apostrophes as valid search characters in searches, however I couldn’t find any in keywords attached to images.
- Prognosis: You can not include apostrophes in any of your keywords. However, because their search engine does recognize them, make sure you have appropriate apostrophes in your titles and descriptions as the search engine searches them as well.
Capitalization:
- Prognosis: Dreamstime ignores capitalization when searching, and imports all letters as lower case.
Abbreviations:
- Result: Dreamstime returned different results for all sets of searches.
- Prognosis: You do need to include all common abbreviations for your keywords.
Individual Letters:
- Result: Dreamstime returned the good results for all my individual letter searches.
- Prognosis: If appropriate, you should include individual letters as keywords.
Numerals:
- Result: Dreamstime returned the same results for all my numeral searches
- Prognosis: If appropriate, you can include numerals as keywords.
Tab Delimiter:
- Prognosis: Unclear
Alphabetization of Keywords:
- Prognosis: Dreamstime puts all your keywords into alphabetical order, so don’t bother worrying about the order you put them in.
Keyword Weight:
- Result: There was clear indication that images were ranked based upon having the search word in either the title or the description. However, the keywords were alphabetizes eliminating the possibility of keyword order mattering. In my searches, I regularly found the first image returned had many keywords, indicating that fewer keywords was not a factor.
- Prognosis: Use the very important keywords in your title and description, as these seem very important. That said, there was pretty clear evidence that there is no weighting based on order or number of keywords.
Number of Keywords Allowed:
- Result: As seen in the comment below, by Dreamstime, they have a max of 80 keywords per image.
Disambiguation of Homographs:
- Prognosis: Dreamstime does not help the searcher out with keywords with multiple meanings. If you use the keyword trunk, you better also have elephant, tree, car, or luggage if you hope to have this image found
Faceted Search: Dreamstime offers none of the usual faceted searches, such as format, category, image type, etc
- Prognosis: This means that it is very important that you do need to keyword all words found that are often taken care of for you at other stock houses, such as; horizontal format, vertical, black and white image, vector, color illustration.
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While Dreamstime offers virtually no keywording guidelines in their FAQs or resources, they do have a lot of posts in their blog on the subject: http://blog.dreamstime.com/search-tag-keywords.
However I will warn you that many of these posts are written by contributors and some have downright false or misleading information. In particular this one, where the writer posits that the reason their image wasn’t being bought was because of too many keywords, without actually finding out if this was true. This drives me crazy. It is very clear that Dreamstime does not weight image rankings by the number of keywords. I find the fact that Dreamstime hasn’t responded to or removed this post in 3 years is a little troubling.
This gives me the opportunity to get back to my usual rant: Be careful when listening to other photographer’s advice on keywording! Most people (and artist’s in particular) don’t understand the scientific method, and instead of investigating to find out the reality of the situation, they jump to a quick conclusion based on whatever limited evidence they have at hand.
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That it seems to me is everything you need to know about the way Dreamstime deals with keywords. With this information you should be able to modify your keywords appropriately and see an immediate increase in you numbers.
Previous Stock House analyses:
- How AgeFotoStock Handles Keywords
- Image Keywording for Alamy.com
- Image Keywording for 123rf.com
- How Shutterstock.com Handles Keywords
