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There is also a question of correct keywords which nonetheless yield the wrong results. I had some photos of a Monterey Bay marine science facility owned by Stanford University. They kept coming up on searches for "Stanford University" and it's fairly clear that isn't what the clients were looking for, so I deleted those keywords. If I could somehow digitally fasten the terms to Hopkins Research or marine biology it would be better. In the same vein, I would like to find a way to link words within a phrase, perhaps using a + symbol, so they are locked together. In that way, sea+lion would come up under searches for sea lion, but not for lion by itself.

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13 minutes ago, DDoug said:

There is also a question of correct keywords which nonetheless yield the wrong results. I had some photos of a Monterey Bay marine science facility owned by Stanford University. They kept coming up on searches for "Stanford University" and it's fairly clear that isn't what the clients were looking for, so I deleted those keywords. If I could somehow digitally fasten the terms to Hopkins Research or marine biology it would be better. In the same vein, I would like to find a way to link words within a phrase, perhaps using a + symbol, so they are locked together. In that way, sea+lion would come up under searches for sea lion, but not for lion by itself.

 

Maybe it's time to create an extra tier of tags that are less important, but would still be searchable.

Maybe call them Additional Tags.

;-)

 

wim

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On 27/08/2017 at 02:19, John Mitchell said:

Supplying wrong information in captions and tags -- for whatever reason -- won't benefit the perpetrators, but it probably does help the rest of us.

I'm not sure, if I was a buyer, I'd soon get very fed up with all the wrong results.

However, only the niche specialist (expensive) agencies are better, AFAICS, so it might not be a choice for some.

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I was really struggling the other day (well, like every day these days) when I had a picture come up in a search for "Peru" or something like this. I didn't have it in the captions or keywords and wondered whether I was losing my mind - until I found the word in the location tags on page 2. Phew. 

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49 minutes ago, DDoug said:

There is also a question of correct keywords which nonetheless yield the wrong results. I had some photos of a Monterey Bay marine science facility owned by Stanford University. They kept coming up on searches for "Stanford University" and it's fairly clear that isn't what the clients were looking for, so I deleted those keywords. If I could somehow digitally fasten the terms to Hopkins Research or marine biology it would be better. In the same vein, I would like to find a way to link words within a phrase, perhaps using a + symbol, so they are locked together. In that way, sea+lion would come up under searches for sea lion, but not for lion by itself.

For that sort of thing, I'd put the extra info into the description, which the last time I checked wasn't searchable. But in the old IM, the location string had been made unsearchable a few years back, but via vpics' post above, it seems now to be searchable again. :-(

I hope that's not going to lead again to things like London Street (on old files) in the location field showing up in searches for London. That would be a backward move - I used to get a LOT of false hits that way. But from vpics' post, I suspect that will be the case (esp on old files, where we were encouraged to put in the street and area as well as town, country).

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I was just looking to see if the name field had become searchable, as my surname is a city. It seems not to be :), but in the search I found some 'surprising' results.

I found that some big celeb shooter uploads from these 'celebs pose in front of a sponsor board' events and has all of the celebs from one event in the keywords of each image, so that a photo of one celeb has the names of 20 celebs in the keywords (one of them, unknown to me, shares my surname, but not the person in the pic I checked - or the 18 others)

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Also as has been mentioned in other threads, the bizarre 'discoverability' thing makes people think they must have 50 keywords and almost forces them to spam. Sure I could get 50 keywords on many of my files by putting e.g. 'white' if there was a tiny bit of white in the image, but I wouldn't do that.

 

Then there is the person (no doubt an example of many) who boasted about all his files being 'in the green', but spams constantly. Even when some of his worst keywords were pointed out to him - at his request - he has chosen not to remove them.

 

Like Betty, I'd be grateful for having any poor keywords in my files pointed out. I happened to discover a nightmare file only a few days ago, by chance (I seem to have keyworded the wrong file, it was totally irrelevantly captioned and keyworded - no idea how that happened as it wasn't even in the same folder on my HD as the file the description and keywords referred to :huh:.)

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49 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

I think Jeff is on to something. The very good results of that German agency may well show that spamming works in the current algorithm & setup.

 

wim

 

I really, really hope that not is the case. After all that Alamy have said about the correct way to keyword images it would be just too bad and a betrayal of loyal and diligent contributors to have a system which rewards bad practices. 

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23 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

 

I really, really hope that not is the case. After all that Alamy have said about the correct way to keyword images it would be just too bad and a betrayal of loyal and diligent contributors to have a system which rewards bad practices. 

 

I didn't say it was on purpose. It may well be the result of too much tinkering and simplification.

Then again the good results (in searches) of that agency may also be because of the high quality of their images that result in many sales, which result in higher placement.

There have been some spots in the Image Found threads.

 

wim

 

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29 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

 

I really, really hope that not is the case. After all that Alamy have said about the correct way to keyword images it would be just too bad and a betrayal of loyal and diligent contributors to have a system which rewards bad practices. 

 

I also think that having every image and illustration going through reportage and historical, therefore bypassing QC is another abomination of abusing the system.

 

Jill

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3 hours ago, wiskerke said:

I think Jeff is on to something. The very good results of that German agency may well show that spamming works in the current algorithm & setup.

 

wim

 

It could be that the German agency is sending their buying clients to Alamy, so they get good sales results in spite of their keywording.

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8 hours ago, DDoug said:

There is also a question of correct keywords which nonetheless yield the wrong results. I had some photos of a Monterey Bay marine science facility owned by Stanford University. They kept coming up on searches for "Stanford University" and it's fairly clear that isn't what the clients were looking for, so I deleted those keywords. If I could somehow digitally fasten the terms to Hopkins Research or marine biology it would be better. In the same vein, I would like to find a way to link words within a phrase, perhaps using a + symbol, so they are locked together. In that way, sea+lion would come up under searches for sea lion, but not for lion by itself.

 

Indeed. I did a double-take when this shot of mine came up in a search for virgin space travel:

 

monte-lussari-monte-santo-di-lussari-udi

 

Then I realised that I had tagged the image with the words space (as in open space, though I kept these separate), and travel ... and, since this is a religious place dedicated to the Virgin Mary, I had Virgin Mary as a single tag.

 

Alamy could solve part of the problem by making tags searchable as a whole so an image won't come up in a search if the search term is part of a multi-word tag. 

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1 hour ago, Kukkudrill said:

 

Indeed. I did a double-take when this shot of mine came up in a search for virgin space travel:

 

monte-lussari-monte-santo-di-lussari-udi

 

Then I realised that I had tagged the image with the words space (as in open space, though I kept these separate), and travel ... and, since this is a religious place dedicated to the Virgin Mary, I had Virgin Mary as a single tag.

 

Alamy could solve part of the problem by making tags searchable as a whole so an image won't come up in a search if the search term is part of a multi-word tag. 

 

Supposedly words in a multi-word tag are supposed to have lower relevance than those as single tags.  How many images did the buyer look at?

 

Jill

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1 hour ago, Kukkudrill said:

 

Indeed. I did a double-take when this shot of mine came up in a search for virgin space travel:

 

monte-lussari-monte-santo-di-lussari-udi

 

Then I realised that I had tagged the image with the words space (as in open space, though I kept these separate), and travel ... and, since this is a religious place dedicated to the Virgin Mary, I had Virgin Mary as a single tag.

 

Alamy could solve part of the problem by making tags searchable as a whole so an image won't come up in a search if the search term is part of a multi-word tag. 

To misuse a Star Trek reference, the search engine had obviously decided to go where none had gone before. ;)

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9 hours ago, Jill Morgan said:

 

Supposedly words in a multi-word tag are supposed to have lower relevance than those as single tags.  How many images did the buyer look at?

 

Jill

 

900, but I tried the search myself and my image comes up in the second page. Plenty of other travel related images turn up in the search, and not all of them appear to have a religious theme.

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