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A little advice from a Mexican contributor


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Hello :)

As I said in my introduction, I have been part of Alamy since late September of 2018 but I had not participated in the forum till now.

 

I have been wanting to post a comment about  many contributors making the mistake of naming Mexico as Central America or South America in their captions and keywords.  I know it is confusing but Mexico is in North America and I have the feeling this little detail might be affecting many photographers when the client makes their search.

 

Have a lovely day 🌷

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10 minutes ago, Adriana said:

Hello :)

As I said in my introduction, I have been part of Alamy since late September of 2018 but I had not participated in the forum till now.

 

I have been wanting to post a comment about  many contributors making the mistake of naming Mexico as Central America or South America in their captions and keywords.  I know it is confusing but Mexico is in North America and I have the feeling this little detail might be affecting many photographers when the client makes their search.

 

Have a lovely day 🌷

Thank you Adriana - that is very useful

 

Kind regards

 

Kumar

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58 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

All of Central America is in the continent of North America.

 

These days, North America usually refers to Canada, the USA, and Mexico (e.g. NAFTA). You might be right geographically speaking, though. Central America and the Caribbean are sometimes included as sub-regions of North America. I guess you could say that there is Northern North America and Southern North America, but that starts to get pretty confusing.

 

Edited by John Mitchell
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Just about as confusing as how Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, England, United Kingdom, Great Britain relate to each other. I have lost count of the number of times when travelling, telling people I live in Scotland, only for it to be referred to as somewhere in England.

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5 hours ago, Adriana said:

Hello :)

As I said in my introduction, I have been part of Alamy since late September of 2018 but I had not participated in the forum till now.

 

I have been wanting to post a comment about  many contributors making the mistake of naming Mexico as Central America or South America in their captions and keywords.  I know it is confusing but Mexico is in North America and I have the feeling this little detail might be affecting many photographers when the client makes their search.

 

Have a lovely day 🌷

 

I consider Mexico its own category, and suspect that's the case for most people doing searches.  For my Nicaraguan photos, I use the country and Central America as I think most searches will be for the country or Central America with an additional search term to narrow down the results. 


Central America is technically also part of North America in geological terms.

 

 

Greetings from an old Gringa in Nicaragua, Central America, North America.

Edited by MizBrown
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6 hours ago, Adriana said:

Hello :)

As I said in my introduction, I have been part of Alamy since late September of 2018 but I had not participated in the forum till now.

 

I have been wanting to post a comment about  many contributors making the mistake of naming Mexico as Central America or South America in their captions and keywords.  I know it is confusing but Mexico is in North America and I have the feeling this little detail might be affecting many photographers when the client makes their search.

 

Have a lovely day 🌷

It's a difficult situation, Adriana. You're right, of course, but when tagging (keywording) I try to also take account of the fact that those searching can sometimes be just as ignorant (as in 'unaware') of geographical location! This can also apply to spelling: I will sometimes include common misspellings in my tags and have licensed at least one image owing to searches and zooms on a misspelled word. I even had one licence of an image of a very specific local pastry from Catalonia, which I researched and keyworded very carefully, only for it to be used in a Russian magazine in an article about regional Spanish cuisine as a totally different pastry! You can't win! :)

You have to *very* careful, of course. Generally speaking, it's best to be as thorough and correct as possible. I would never use any 'incorrect' information in captions, descriptions or news photos.

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9 hours ago, Adriana said:

Hello :)

As I said in my introduction, I have been part of Alamy since late September of 2018 but I had not participated in the forum till now.

 

I have been wanting to post a comment about  many contributors making the mistake of naming Mexico as Central America or South America in their captions and keywords.  I know it is confusing but Mexico is in North America and I have the feeling this little detail might be affecting many photographers when the client makes their search.

 

Have a lovely day 🌷

 

 

but KWs are about getting your image found.  I sometimes put some that i don't believe are correct, because people use them.  For example if i had images of Guatemala i would put Central American even though it's in North America geographically speaking.  

 

An example in Mexico, the Capital of Oaxaca is called Oaxaca de Juarez, at some point i had a search where my best images were not included, because someone used "Oaxaca City"  (i guess to exclude images from the rest of the State) as their search.  (i would have some issue if i had images of Québec, as i would forget anglophone call it Quebec City).

 

Yes we need to avoid wrong and misleading terms,  but sometimes it gets gray/grey.  That said i would bury it in the KW, not in the description. 

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I understand you, Adriana. Consider that, when I do keywording, I sometimes spell Italian names uncorrectly, on purpose. For example I write, along with "Giuseppe Verdi", also "Guiseppe Verdi" because I am aware, from my esperience, that many English-speaking people write and search it that way. It hurts me a bit to do that, but, in business, many times taking into account your potential customers' ignorance rewards you.

Edited by riccarbi
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There's another thread where this was discussed:

 

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/8336-keywording-and-misspellings/

 

That thread was prompted by a tweet from Alamy:

"Don’t add what you think is a spelling mistake someone might make e.g. desert & dessert, our search engine will punish this."

 

Not suggesting that anyone should change their way of doing things but clearly Alamy don't agree with adding misspellings. On Google the results from alternative spellings will be suggested but not on Alamy so it's hard to understand why they wouldn't endorse it, or how they punish it.

Edited by Harry Harrison
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Going slightly off topic.

 

Predictive text has a lot to answer for here. 

 

Alamy has over 26k images for 'filed' most of which look like they should be 'field'. 

 

Check your own!

 

"Wheat filed with tractor trails" 

Edited by geogphotos
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Many people (including those whose photos are here) incorrectly spell the lovely UK Devon town of Barnstaple (correct) as Barnstable (incorrect).

 

Barnstaple Devon 2631 views

Barnstable Devon 291 views

 

I'm sure that some have keyworded both spellings, to allow for the picture researchers who also can't spell !

 

....... to adriana for highlighting the Mexico/North America issue....  Gracias !

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Firstly, it's important to get captions and keywords exactly right... according to the atlas and dictionary and thesaurus. Then maybe think of words that people commonly use, even if not 'correctly'. According to a bird-watcher (like me), there's no such thing as a 'seagull'. There are herring gulls, black-headed gulls, etc. But plenty of people say 'seagull', so that goes into the keywords too...

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3 hours ago, BobD said:

I purposely often use common misspellings.

 

I often use misspellings too. But then I never could spell.

 

Allan

 

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8 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

There's another thread where this was discussed:

 

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/8336-keywording-and-misspellings/

 

That thread was prompted by a tweet from Alamy:

"Don’t add what you think is a spelling mistake someone might make e.g. desert & dessert, our search engine will punish this."

 

Not suggesting that anyone should change their way of doing things but clearly Alamy don't agree with adding misspellings. On Google the results from alternative spellings will be suggested but not on Alamy so it's hard to understand why they wouldn't endorse it, or how they punish it.

 

 

My issue is they state the same with foreign words, yet have not addressed the issue that people use some of these in English language searches.  I've seen searches regarding the Way of Saint James where images were excluded for not including Albergue, Peregrino and Camino.

 

(and even more problematic issues on other language mirror sites.  For Example a search on the French version for "Chemin de Compostelle" will not return images for "Way of St-james" nor "Camino de Santiago" )

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While we're on the subject of Mexico and Central America, there are no such people as the "Mayans". It's the Maya.

 

Strictly speaking, "Mayan" is an adjective -- e.g. Mayan ruins, Mayan food, etc. -- not a noun. However, archaeologists and the like often prefer to use "Maya" as an adjective as well  -- e.g. Maya ruins, Maya food.

 

Just thought I'd toss that in to add to the confusion...

 

 

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13 minutes ago, John Mitchell said:

While we're on the subject of Mexico and Central America, there are no such people as the "Mayans". It's the Maya.

 

Strictly speaking, "Mayan" is an adjective -- e.g. Mayan ruins, Mayan food, etc. -- not a noun. However, archaeologists and the like often prefer to use "Maya" as an adjective as well  -- e.g. Maya ruins, Maya food.

 

Just thought I'd toss that in to add to the confusion...

 

 

Thanks, I will change it. I always appreciate advice. 

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