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I was cleaning up some old files that had more than 50 keywords now that the new interface has improved, making it seem less daunting, and discovered that it is more of a mess than I had anticipated. Many of my images seem to have most of the keywords doubled, and not because I put a word in singly and then as part of phrase (although that does account for some issues) but instead some of my photos seem to have big swaths of keywords repeated in order. It's as though the system is spamming itself! Being able to copy all, put them into a Pages (Word) document and then clean them up from there helps, but I am quite frustrated that I have to go through all of my images now. I had gone through some when the whole new AIM and tagging started and I don't recall noticing this problem with any of my images them; it seems to me like something changed recently to cause this to happen. And I'm noticing it with newer photos. If had been old ones from the days of the three-part entry method, especially when I was just starting out and thought that more was better, I'd shake my head and understand, but these are files that were keyworded much more sparingly, I even checked corresponding images in Lightroom to be sure. So what's up? Anyone else have this issue? After having gone through all my images when we were told to add quotes to phrases (remember when?), and then having cleaned things up again after that.. .and then spending several hours and day all over again when this whole tagging and supertagging thing started, I had decided that I wasn't going to kill myself by doing it all at once,, but would do some cleanup now and again, not really thinking it was a big deal. However, it seems as though I will have no choice but to review all my images or I will continue to see my views and CTR drop - they have gone off a cliff in the past few months and I'm wondering if this apparent glitch is part of the reason. All of my phrases, which were separated wither by commas or were in quotes, have been split up, so that, for example, images tagged "New England" suddenly have "new" and "England" as two separate supertags, really great for my CTR here in the states. Feeling very frustrated by all this. Really kinda annoyed after being invited to be among the first Reportage photographers, then unceremoniously dropped from Live News, and don't get me started on the new commission. (I am not jumping up and down about the exclusivity button - most of my pix are exclusive here, but I'm not ticking it as I don't plan to put all my eggs in this basket). Yes, rant over but really I'd rather be uploading new work than dealing with all my old images. And btw, that news rant wasn't for nothing. All of my Live News images that I've gone through so far seem to have their keywords doubled, some sort of glitch in the system so it's spamming itself? Weird! Anyone else notice this issue? I searched the forum but didn't see anything about it. I had not noticed it before. Thanks for any clues you might have as to what's going on and how I can fix it other than with countless hours of work. I have ordered a CSV file of my images, but while I use Numbers (Mac's version of Excel) for keeping track of various financial matters, I don't know if it will help me with data entry for my pix since I don't know how to export the data from an Excel spreadsheet. Numbers for Dummies perhaps? Ugh!

I need some advice from the forum in terms of a keyword problem issue. The issue was sent to Alamy and they replied there is nothing I can do but I am wondering if other contributors have found a way around it. Here is my email to them and then their reply. Any advice is appreciated. My email: In the past month someone has been searching for photos of Geneva in Switzerland and it keeps happening. Unfortunately I have posted a cadre of photos of Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio, a resort town in Ohio, USA. "Geneva" is not in any of my search terms but instead it should only be coming up in the search engine when it is as I have put it, "Geneva-on-the-Lake" with hyphens as the town is known. My CTR has taken a major hit because of over 100 views over several sessions. How do I stop my photos from appearing for searches of "Geneva"? If you put in the search engine "Geneva-on-the-Lake" you will see I am the only one to have photos posted of this popular northeast US resort town and that none of the search terms are "Geneva" on its own. I cannot strip the photos of their title "Geneva-on-the-Lake" otherwise they will obviously not be found. Alamy reply: If you have ‘Geneva’ anywhere in the tags or captions of your images, they will appear in a search for ‘Geneva’ even if the word is part of a multi-word tag. Our search engine doesn’t recognise most punctuation such as apostrophes, hyphens etc so have ‘Geneva-on-the-Lake" won’t make a difference.There is no way you can stop images of “Geneva-on-the-Lake" from appearing in a search for ‘Geneva’ unless you remove this word. Obviously I cannot remove the name of the town otherwise people who are looking for photos of Geneva-on-the-Lake will not appear. Has anyone found a way around this type of situation? Some other examples may be if I put up photos of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Would searches for "santa" bring up my photos of Santa Fe? If someone is searching for photos of "Mexico", will photos of New Mexico (the state) come up in the search? If there are photos of New York, will the search "York" bring up photos of the city in the US instead of York England? There has to be a way for terms that cannot be left out of keywording be delineated but I am at a loss as to how. When I wrote earlier that over 100 views over several sessions is impacting my CTR, I should clarify that over 100 of my photos (several repeat searches) of Geneva-on-the-Lake have been viewed with no zooms of them seeing as what is being searched for is a completely different locale.