The last few years have seen a real intrusion on my love for taking pictures; Keywording. It’s a hate thing, really. I call it the bane of my (professional) existence. But it is the necessary evil in the stock photo industry. I have a hard time feeling like anyone else can keyword my images better than me. For example, would someone else know when to apply the term “exfoliation” to as scenic picture taken in Yosemite?
It is practically guaranteed that every time I sit down to keyword, I wind up asking myself, “Can I find or afford someone else to do this for me?” So far, I haven’t made the plunge, but the good folks over at About The Image have made a nice list of vendors that actually provide keywording services. I’m sure it will come in hand when I just can’t to do the job myself anymore.
And as a final note, keywording is one of the toughest aspects of this job. It takes a huge amount of mental energy and focus. I like to say that after a day of keywording, I feel like someone stuck a straw in my skull and sucked out all my grey matter. But if the images aren’t keyworded correctly, the simple truth is that buyers won’t find your images.
It has to be done, and it has to be done right the first time. Sometimes though, I wish I had a job taste testing cauliflower.
Agreed, and I haven’t even been pushing my work for that long, (started last year). It seems like now hours will pass and I’d only done a few images. Before I’d make my master files from the day’s selects within an hour, but now it takes bits and parts of several days. If it starts taking all the enjoyment from completing my images then I’d rather just not do it.
I need to find a more effective and efficient way to do it. I especially hate keywording my website since I use dreamweaver and it gets really redundant. I’ll have to do more research on keywording to better understand it. The photoportfolios.net search engine appears to be the worst for searching keywords because it doesn’t appear to understand multiple word combination searches. I’ve done a lot of stock searches for my advertising work, and I avoid search engines like that.
Gary:
Thanks for sharing this sentiment here and on the Controlled Vocabulary forum. I coudn’t agree with you more. However those that wish to take on this task themselves need to understand that they may need tools to help them apply specific terms in a consistent basis, and to ensure that those terms are spelled correctly. It might sound simplistic, but from experience I know it’s not. That’s why I started my first hierarchical controlled vocabulary list over ten years ago, and continue to add to it. For those that are interested it’s available on the Controlled Vocabulary site.
David