Importance of Captions

[RichardNixon]

Hi there,

 

A bit of a newbie question.  I'm still getting the hang of the AIM, and then they go and update it so that the "Date Taken" no longer reflects the actual date taken.  But that aside, how important are the captions?

 

Are they searchable?  Is important information supposed to go in there or is it good enough to just have things like locations and dates in the tags?

 

I can imagine captions becoming just a long rambling collection of description, location, dates etc.  In fact more or less what you put in the tags

 

So, do I now need to put location and date taken in the Caption, or will they be found if I just put them in the tags?

 

Many thanks

[NYCat]

Put as much as you possibly can in your captions. They have a very heavy weight in searches. I'm not sure why you think the date taken is important. Some people only put the location in the caption if it is important.

 

Paulette

[Jill Morgan]

Your caption is searchable so should describe exactly what is in the image.  I will put in the location if I feel it is an important factor to the image, but not if there are more relevant words and then just leave the location in the tags.

 

Jill

[Cryptoprocta]

At the moment, and for several months at least, caption has more weighting than keywords (in some searches, the top file or 'top ten' files have no keywords at all [legacy]).

They can't become a 'long rambling collection' as you only have 150 characters, unless it's Live News. All the most relevant words should be in the caption.

 

Bear in mind that the algorithm might change so that keywords have more weighting, so keyword well in addition to writing a good caption. Don't worry about reaching green discoverability, that just encourages spamming.

Edited November 2, 2018 by Cryptoprocta

[Ed Rooney]

21 minutes ago, NYCat said:

Put as much as you possibly can in your captions. They have a very heavy weight in searches. I'm not sure why you think the date taken is important. Some people only put the location in the caption if it is important.

 

Paulette

 

As Paulette wisely suggests, I try to put as much information as possible in the caption. I have not got a single image with anywhere near 50 tags, yet my sales are steady. The date the image was captured? I would like to see that disappear. 

 

Paulette, I can't find your email, so let me tell you here: in Seville they take much better care of their carriage horses than in NYC. The animals are younger, so they do not work into old age. Animals (who are not fighting bulls) do well in Spain. 

 

Edo

[RedSnapper]

My advice, for what its worth

 

Try to cover the 5 'W's in your caption..

 

who

what

why

where

when

 

and you wont go far  wrong

 

km

 

 

[Cryptoprocta]

1 hour ago, NYCat said:

 I'm not sure why you think the date taken is important.

Probably because an admittedly small proportion of searches every day have [DT] which indicates the buyer has indicated a date range within which they want the image to have been made. Why would you not want to be seen by these buyers if your date was relevant?

(I hadn't noticed the date change thing, I must check it out.)

 

Later: as it happens, I've recently uploaded some files from 2013, and the dates are correct in AIM. What date changes do you (OP) see?

Edited November 2, 2018 by Cryptoprocta

[RichardNixon]

I was asking about the date because it's now not appearing accurately in AIM.  I don't know enough about how important it is to buyers and I was a bit concerned that if it was not correct I could be missing out.  But thinking about it I don't have any historical or archival images so maybe I don't need to be worrying.

 

[Cryptoprocta]

1 minute ago, RichardNixon said:

I was asking about the date because it's now not appearing accurately in AIM.  I don't know enough about how important it is to buyers and I was a bit concerned that if it was not correct I could be missing out.  But thinking about it I don't have any historical or archival images so maybe I don't need to be worrying.

 

In what way is it changing? All my files that I looked at have the correct date, as shown in camera.  I've never experienced a date change.

 

I'm not sure what happens if your camera date was wrong and you changed it: maybe AIM  defaults to the camera date and doesn't let you change it? (Does anyone know?)

 

By looking at my [DT] searches, it's more like the buyer wants an up-to-date file; but they presumably use 'date range' for archival/historical too.

[Richard Baker]

As well as the weight that captions offer in searches, I'd add that a well-written caption (as described by RedSnapper above) will often seduce a buyer and that the more work one puts into researching background information - in the case of a 600 characters, anyway - it will help seal the deal.

 

There are a lot of lazy captions out there and while that doesn't mean they won't ever sell, I'll wager they'd have more chance with a coherent sentence!

[RichardNixon]

I haven't changed the date on my camera.  This has just started happening in the last couple of weeks.

 

My last submission was sent in on 27th October.   I've just checked against the files in that batch for submission , and in the "optional" section, "date taken", all the date now correspond to the dates the PSD files were saved after editing.  Dates are now reading 12th, 13th and 27th October in that batch.

 

Notice I said PSD files, because the files that are uploaded are jpegs of course, and they were all created on 27th October.  So I would have expected the date to appear as per the creation of the jpegs

 

Anyway, something has occurred recently, because all my other files have shown the correct Date Taken, regardless of when I last edited them and saved them as jpegs for upload.

 

Maybe I'm making something out of nothing.  I'm sure it'll be sorted out eventually.  Maybe I should send an email to Alamy and raise it as a concern.    

 

 

[RichardNixon]

OK,  I've investigated further, and it looks like this has happened since the latest update of Lightroom.  I don't know why, but on "Export" , "Metadata" it was showing "copyright only".

 

Now, I'm prepared to hold my hand up and say I may have changed this, but I honestly can't think why I would have done it.  Maybe it has reverted back to this as a default, or maybe I did change it myself in a Brain Foggy moment.

 

I'll see what happens with the next submission. 

Edited November 2, 2018 by RichardNixon

[Cryptoprocta]

11 minutes ago, RichardNixon said:

My last submission was sent in on 27th October.   I've just checked against the files in that batch for submission , and in the "optional" section, "date taken", all the date now correspond to the dates the PSD files were saved after editing.  Dates are now reading 12th, 13th and 27th October in that batch.

Notice I said PSD files, because the files that are uploaded are jpegs of course, and they were all created on 27th October.  So I would have expected the date to appear as per the creation of the jpegs.

No, because date taken is the date the photo was taken. Looks like AIM was behaving correctly, extracting the date taken from the camera data.

It could be very misleading if the 'date taken' was actually the 'date the file was modified'. For example, for all I know, the things in my pics from 2013 but uploaded earlier this week may have changed a lot.

 

[M.Chapman]

On 02/11/2018 at 10:49, Cryptoprocta said:

At the moment, and for several months at least, caption has more weighting than keywords (in some searches, the top file or 'top ten' files have no keywords at all [legacy]).

They can't become a 'long rambling collection' as you only have 150 characters, unless it's Live News. All the most relevant words should be in the caption.

 

Bear in mind that the algorithm might change so that keywords have more weighting, so keyword well in addition to writing a good caption. Don't worry about reaching green discoverability, that just encourages spamming.

 

My (recent) testing shows that supertags carry more weight than captions. But captions carry more weight than tags. (It's easy to confirm, just move the search term between the caption,  supertags and tags of an image and record what happens to its position each time the database updates). However a previous zoom using the same search term can boost an image's position significantly as can the contributor's rank. Maybe this can explain why you've seen images with no tags appearing above images that do?

 

Mark

 

[Cryptoprocta]

12 minutes ago, M.Chapman said:

 

My (recent) testing shows that supertags carry more weight than captions. But captions carry more weight than tags. (It's easy to confirm, just move the search term between the caption,  supertags and tags of an image and record what happens to its position each time the database updates). However a previous zoom using the same search term can boost an image's position significantly as can the contributor's rank. Maybe this can explain why you've seen images with no tags appearing above images that do?

 

Mark

 

I was assuming it was partly the caption and partly the rank. These no-keyword high flyers were (mostly, maybe all) originally Live News images, and it could be their authors have a really high rank. Whereas in my own case, I've noticed the live news images with tags and supertags tend to settle lower than my own non-live news images in the same search (I've never sold any live news image as actual 'live news').

Edited November 3, 2018 by Cryptoprocta

[John Mitchell]

On 11/2/2018 at 04:05, Ed Rooney said:

 

As Paulette wisely suggests, I try to put as much information as possible in the caption. I have not got a single image with anywhere near 50 tags, yet my sales are steady. The date the image was captured? I would like to see that disappear. 

 

Paulette, I can't find your email, so let me tell you here: in Seville they take much better care of their carriage horses than in NYC. The animals are younger, so they do not work into old age. Animals (who are not fighting bulls) do well in Spain. 

 

Edo

 

Not so sure about that, Edo. Pigs now reportedly almost (or already do) outnumber people in Spain due to the Spanish love of pork. Those millions of intelligent porkers live short and miserable lives on factory farms.  But I digress...

 

Re captions, I'd say that they are really, really important on a primarily editorial agency like Alamy.

 

P.S. Are there any other members of the former Nixon administration on the forum? There appear to be two of us now.

Edited November 3, 2018 by John Mitchell

[Pearl]

On 4 November 2018 at 20:58, LawrensonPhoto said:

Are live news images ranked lower than stock images that have past QC?

In my limited experience, yes they are

 

Pearl

[Steve Valentia]

On 11/2/2018 at 11:06, RedSnapper said:

My advice, for what its worth

 

Try to cover the 5 'W's in your caption..

 

who

what

why

where

when

 

and you wont go far  wrong

 

km

 

 

 

The old press style captioning adds an 'H' too...how.

 

(who / what) Two men (where) crossing the river Thames (how) on an inflatable Christmas pudding (why) raising money for charity (when) on Christmas day.

Edited November 6, 2018 by Steve Valentia