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When I was in Africa, I took a pic of Mount Kilamanjaro which is in Tanzania, but I took the picture from Kenya. It wasn't good enough to upload, but I don't know what I would have put in location. Probably if the pic is of the mountain, I would put where the  mountain is.

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I try to always use the location from which I took the picture in the Alamy location field and in the metadata for my own system in Lightroom. You could take a picture of a mountain, for example, from tens of km any side so using the mountain as the location can be meaningless, moreover if you are embedding GPS data in the metadata, which I have started to do where possible. I'll have the name of the mountain in the caption and the keywords.

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Vincent - you may already know this but I was just looking at some of your images and there are several of the Scotland images on the first page that are showing up as "Sorry, we didn't receive any image". I know that this is an occasional prroblem here and several people were reporting it recently.

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Thanks for the comments.  Yes, as the location field isn't now searched it's probably not that important.

 

Vincent - you may already know this but I was just looking at some of your images and there are several of the Scotland images on the first page that are showing up as "Sorry, we didn't receive any image". I know that this is an occasional prroblem here and several people were reporting it recently.

 

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm getting the same thing.  I assume alamy are looking into it?

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I think it is about the object and would put the location where the mountain is. It is a image of the mountain. You could zoom in and have the feeling that your are closer at the mountain. So it doesnt give for me any additional value to put the location where you are standing. When i make from the living room a photo of the kitchen i will not add the living room in the description.

 

Mirco

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I think it is about the object and would put the location where the mountain is. It is a image of the mountain. You could zoom in and have the feeling that your are closer at the mountain. So it doesnt give for me any additional value to put the location where you are standing. When i make from the living room a photo of the kitchen i will not add the living room in the description.

 

Mirco

 I have to disagree.

 

For example, I've hundreds of pictures of El Teide, the huge volcano on Tenerife, taken from four different other Canary Islands, in some cases more than 100 km away from Tenerife and up to almost 200 km apart from each other - e..g Gran Canaria to El Hierro. To say that the location for that was Teide itself would not make sense to me. I want to know where I was standing when I took the pictures and, as I said above, I want to be able to embed GPS data in the metadata. 

 

A second example is where I've taken pictures of the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia from Dublin in Ireland, about 140 Km away. Again it would be very misleading to say that the location was Snowdonia rather than Dublin.

 

To take a real extreme, if you take a picture of the moon (or the sun), your location was not actually on the moon (or the sun) - I hope :)

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I think it is about the object and would put the location where the mountain is. It is a image of the mountain. You could zoom in and have the feeling that your are closer at the mountain. So it doesnt give for me any additional value to put the location where you are standing. When i make from the living room a photo of the kitchen i will not add the living room in the description.

 

Mirco

 I have to disagree.

 

For example, I've hundreds of pictures of El Teide, the huge volcano on Tenerife, taken from four different other Canary Islands, in some cases more than 100 km away from Tenerife and up to almost 200 km apart from each other - e..g Gran Canaria to El Hierro. To say that the location for that was Teide itself would not make sense to me. I want to know where I was standing when I took the pictures and, as I said above, I want to be able to embed GPS data in the metadata. 

 

A second example is where I've taken pictures of the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia from Dublin in Ireland, about 140 Km away. Again it would be very misleading to say that the location was Snowdonia rather than Dublin.

 

To take a real extreme, if you take a picture of the moon (or the sun), your location was not actually on the moon (or the sun) - I hope :)

 

You're mistaken, MDM. And Mirco is correct; it's what you see in the frame that counts, not where you're standing. The things that are seen in the frame are what we use in keywording. You could have been in Dublin or in a boat in the Irish Sea. Either way, it's irrelative. If a customer is searching for Dublin, he/she wants a picture showing Dublin, not something you may see in the distance. But this argument is irrelative if the location field is not searched . . . and this problem could be solved by saying, "Snowdonia seen from the coast near Dublin."

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I think it is about the object and would put the location where the mountain is. It is a image of the mountain. You could zoom in and have the feeling that your are closer at the mountain. So it doesnt give for me any additional value to put the location where you are standing. When i make from the living room a photo of the kitchen i will not add the living room in the description.

 

Mirco

 I have to disagree.

 

For example, I've hundreds of pictures of El Teide, the huge volcano on Tenerife, taken from four different other Canary Islands, in some cases more than 100 km away from Tenerife and up to almost 200 km apart from each other - e..g Gran Canaria to El Hierro. To say that the location for that was Teide itself would not make sense to me. I want to know where I was standing when I took the pictures and, as I said above, I want to be able to embed GPS data in the metadata. 

 

A second example is where I've taken pictures of the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia from Dublin in Ireland, about 140 Km away. Again it would be very misleading to say that the location was Snowdonia rather than Dublin.

 

To take a real extreme, if you take a picture of the moon (or the sun), your location was not actually on the moon (or the sun) - I hope :)

 

You're mistaken, MDM. And Mirco is correct; it's what you see in the frame that counts, not where you're standing. The things that are seen in the frame are what we use in keywording. You could have been in Dublin or in a boat in the Irish Sea. Either way, it's irrelative. If a customer is searching for Dublin, he/she wants a picture showing Dublin, not something you may see in the distance. But this argument is irrelative if the location field is not searched . . . and this problem could be solved by saying, "Snowdonia seen from the coast near Dublin."

 

Not clear what you are getting at there. I was talking solely about the location field, not keywords, as in the original post. As I said in my first post, I put the name of the mountain in the caption and keywords fields but use the point where I took the picture as the location. This is what you appear to be suggesting one should do so I can't actually see what you mean when you say I am mistaken.

 

Suffice to say that the location recorded by a camera with built-in GPS will be the point at which the picture was taken and if I plot it on a map (as in the map module in Lightroom, for example), then the points will be where the pictures were taken. It seems very simple to me.

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MDM... i just find it a interesting topic to discuss about.

 

Like i said before i still think it is about the object. Especially if you have nothing in the foreground related to where you are standing. An image can start from the background when the subject is in focus there. It is different when you seen as example a person standing in the foreground with a island in the background. Then the location is where the person is standing with island in the background.

 

When looking at a image i think you should forget about the person who is making the image and just look objectivly to the image. This is how people will look at it in magazines. When i see in a magazin a German Mediamarkt store taken from the Dutch border i just think about Germany. This image will be used by people that need German Mediamarkt for German magazine. They dont know that person was standing on Dutch ground. It is just a image of a German Mediamarkt thats is located in Germany.

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MDM... i just find it a interesting topic to discuss about.

 

Like i said before i still think it is about the object. Especially if you have nothing in the foreground related to where you are standing. An image can start from the background when the subject is in focus there. It is different when you seen as example a person standing in the foreground with a island in the background. Then the location is where the person is standing with island in the background.

 

When looking at a image i think you should forget about the person who is making the image and just look objectivly to the image. This is how people will look at it in magazines. When i see in a magazin a German Mediamarkt store taken from the Dutch border i just think about Germany. This image will be used by people that need German Mediamarkt for German magazine. They dont know that person was standing on Dutch ground. It is just a image of a German Mediamarkt thats is located in Germany.

 

Mirco - I'm happy to have an lighthearted pedantic discussion (a discussion just for the sake of discussing) :).

 

So what about a case where you have two or more mountains (to keep it on the mountain theme). I have lots of shots like this including sweeping panoramas which go maybe up to 270 degrees with numerous mountains. What do you call the location in this case. I think there should be just one location and then there can be multiple subjects in the scene.

 

There could also be legal issues at stake here as the exact place where you take the picture can often be important - e.g the discussion of the National Trust in the English Heritage thread last week. The general consensus there seems to be that, under UK law, it is alright to take pictures of a building from a public place for editorial use but it may not be if you are on private property. If you give the location as the property rather than a public place, then this could be significant, perhaps in terms of a publisher deciding to use the picture or not. Or you could be in a different country where different laws hold - e.g shooting into France where the privacy laws are supposedly very strict from Spain say where the laws are probably a lot less strict. This is pedantic but food for thought perhaps.

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Vincent - you may already know this but I was just looking at some of your images and there are several of the Scotland images on the first page that are showing up as "Sorry, we didn't receive any image". I know that this is an occasional prroblem here and several people were reporting it recently.

 

A quick update on this - I've checked through the first three pages of my images and I've noticed that the only images that have this problem have a reference number beginning 'DDW'.  I've checked others at random through several pages, including others from the same batch, but it only seems to be the ones beginning DDW.  I've emailed Member Services.

 

On the location question, I tend to agree with MDM - the subject of the image in the caption field (obviously... :blink: ) and where I took the image from in the location field, even if it's miles away.

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Which is correct depends on Alamy's reasoning on the matter.

 

The problem arose when people in a studio, taking a model shot would put in the keywords "New York". This then led to searches of NYC being plagued with shots of models in front of a white background. Same with a close up of a blackbird shot in London, Or a fried egg shot in Sydney. 

 

However sometimes a client wants to know where a subject is. 

 

So Alamy asked for the location field to be filled in so clients would know where the subject is without it coming up in searches. If the location is relevant - then of course it's in the keywords.

 

So a shot of Belgium has the location "Belgium". The fact that the camera was in Holland or in the case of a long telephoto lens - the moon - is irrelevant. If the photographer is desperate for the client to know he was standing on the moon at the time - then the place to put that information is in the description field.

 

Alamy decided to make the description field not searchable because clients, searching for shots of the moon, kept getting great pictures of Belgium. 

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The reason for making the location field non-searchable is very valid - to prevent spurious searches when the location field is irrelevant (studio shots etc which could have been taken anywhere) - I totally agree and I think it is definitely a good move to make it non-searchable.

 

But this is quite distinct from the question as to what should go in the location field where it is relevant, as for landscapes. That is the only thing I have been discussing - the original question considers a distant mountain. Whether the location field is searchable or not is also irrelevant in the pedantic discussion as to what should go there. Searchable or not, it is a very useful information field and seems to me the most sensible field into which to give the locality where the picture was taken.

 

It makes no sense to me to give the location as a mountain which may be 150 km away from where I actually took the picture as the location, moreover if I have numerous pictures of the same mountain taken from very widely dispersed localities. Or, as I said above, what if there are two or more mountains in the picture which may be also be a long distance apart from each other. The location is a totally objective single entity - the coordinates of the point at which the image was taken, as recorded by a GPS, for example.

 

Finally Alamy guidance states clearly: "Put the location where the image was taken using the convention of street name, town, city, state, province, country. This information can make or lose a sale."

 

Back to my images.

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<MDM wrote: Finally Alamy guidance states clearly: "Put the location where the image was taken using the convention of street name, town, city, state, province, country. This information can make or lose a sale.">

 

Hi MDM,

 

Good post, I certainly see where you're coming from. I do disagree though ;-) for all the reasons mentioned earlier.

 

You have quoted Alamy and, as I read exactly what's written, you have taken it precisely; which must be the correct thing to do.

However I suggest that Alamy have not written what they meant to write - don't roll your eyes!

 

I think they meant to write this:

 

"Paul's post is the correct one and we meant to say where the subject is".   ;-)))

 

Cheers,

Paul

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<MDM wrote: Finally Alamy guidance states clearly: "Put the location where the image was taken using the convention of street name, town, city, state, province, country. This information can make or lose a sale.">

 

Hi MDM,

 

Good post, I certainly see where you're coming from. I do disagree though ;-) for all the reasons mentioned earlier.

 

You have quoted Alamy and, as I read exactly what's written, you have taken it precisely; which must be the correct thing to do.

However I suggest that Alamy have not written what they meant to write - don't roll your eyes!

 

I think they meant to write this:

 

"Paul's post is the correct one and we meant to say where the subject is".   ;-)))

 

Cheers,

Paul

 

OK you've convinced me. Now all you've got to do is convince Mirco B).

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When in doubt, try to see things from the viewpoint of a potential buyer. What combination of keywords (and other info) will help buyers find my pix? And how can l stop my pix turning up in searches when they’re not appropriate?

 

IMO says it all. There is no right or wrong answer, only a need to define the context of the pic to fall within the buyers objectives.

 

dov

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