Keywords, captions, supertags, location

[rickygui]

Been in my mind for a long time. Please help. 

 

1) Let's say my caption have "luxury brand shops", is it necessary to include in keywords again?

2) Is supertags necessary to apply?

3) At the Optional section, there is "location". Is it necessary to apply again when caption and keywords already stated the location?
 

[Cal]

I can't offer a detailed factual answer regarding the first two questions but I personally always try to add tags that mirror the important aspects of the title.

Regarding the optional section, I'd say you owe it to yourself to help describe your image as much as possible, so I often do fill out the location and where there is a story to be told I add text in the "more information" as well, sometimes quite lengthy. While these fields aren't searchable the information provided in them is valuable and could tip the scale towards a buyer purchasing your image or not doing so, particularly in a case where you have something of historic or unique interest.

[NYCat]

In order to have your images show up high in search results I suggest that you put as much information as possible in the caption. Then put that same information in the keywords and choose the most important as super tags. My experiments have shown the caption to be most important and supertags after that. The same information in caption and supertags gets the best results. I agree with Cal about the location.

 

Paulette

[meanderingemu]

Based on some random tests

 

1)Caption is most influential for search

2)Supertag did boost an image in the rankings

3)Having something in KW that was also it caption did not seem to have as much impact

 

so I try to have Supertags first for words that are Not in the caption but highly important to the content of the image.

 

  I will also use it for combined terms (think "Cape Town", "Northern Cardinal" etc.), though no empirical data that this helps.

 

 

Location, not sure.  Does anyone know if any of the affiliates grab it and use it like they supposedly do for Categories?

[Colin Woods]

Captions should be full descriptive senteces. So for you luxury brand shops your caption should be something like "The interior of X luxury brand shop in Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport" or "The exterior of X luxury brand shop on Bond Street in London, showing Rolex watches in the window". You get the idea. Supertags absolutely use them all for the ten words that define your image. And, though this has been on a few threads lately, don<t over-keyword and ignore the discoverability bar. As long as you have answered Who What Where When Why and How in your keywords you can ignore the disco bar and whether it is green or orange. Its a very badly designed tool and should be deleted, but if its not deleted you can do the next best thing and ugnore it.

[rickygui]

Extremely useful tips and understanding of it. Thank you so much everyone. 

 

Anymore input please share as it will be helpful for the community. 

[spacecadet]

Officially the caption is not as important as the tags, but as you see some contributors believe otherwise. I'm not sure, but I follow their advice anyway in case I'm wrong: the gist of the caption goes into supertags.

I don't bother with location or discoverability. Location should be in supertags if it's important or tags if it's relevant.

There's an argument for leaving location out of tags altogether to avoid false positives if it's truly irrelevant. I know of one contributor who leaves it out of many of his food images if they're fairly generic and not representative of the area where they are taken, and they sell very well.

[M.Chapman]

1 hour ago, spacecadet said:

Officially the caption is not as important as the tags

Where did you see that?

Last time I tested it I think words in caption and super-tags were given equal weighting and tags had  a lower weighting. But it does change from time to time. I remember at one point tags were the most important, but that was a bug....  ISTR Philippe getting most upset... There's also been a time when super-tags were given the highest weighting. It's easy enough to test what the latest algorithm is doing over a few days.

 

Mark

Edited November 4, 2020 by M.Chapman

[spacecadet]

15 hours ago, M.Chapman said:

Where did you see that?

Alamy have always said so.

[Ed Rooney]

Ricky, forgive me for asking a side-issue question here: 

 

Is it important to use italics, caps, quotation marks in Alamy tags . . . or is it irrelative in a search?

 

 

[Stokie]

44 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said:

Ricky, forgive me for asking a side-issue question here: 

 

Is it important to use italics, caps, quotation marks in Alamy tags . . . or is it irrelative in a search?

 

 

 

I know quotation marks don't make any difference in a search and I don't think any of the others do either.

 

John.

[meanderingemu]

1 hour ago, Ed Rooney said:

Ricky, forgive me for asking a side-issue question here: 

 

Is it important to use italics, caps, quotation marks in Alamy tags . . . or is it irrelative in a search?

 

 

 

Caps have no impact in search results, so don't think it would affect, though it does double up your number of KW doing both, so if you want to get more Green lights just change the one letter to caps many time.  i just added 5 KW to an image: time, Time, tIme, TIme, TIME. 

[Ed Rooney]

Thanks, John and Jean-François.

 

I have no green images, nor do I care about them. That is a clever way to game the system though. 

[meanderingemu]

29 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said:

Thanks, John and Jean-François.

 

I have no green images, nor do I care about them. That is a clever way to game the system though. 

 

not really gaming, since that has absolutely no impact that i can see.  it's just if someone really worried about not having "green light", well there you go.  

 

 

[M.Chapman]

21 hours ago, spacecadet said:

Alamy have always said so.

 

I beg to differ. Whenever I've asked they say that supertags are more important than tags, but the weighting given to captions and other factors can be changed at any time. During a discussion at the NEC on the Alamy (in 2019?) I was told Alamy have the software equivalent of a "mixing desk" with "sliders" and "switches" that allow them to manipulate the weighting given to a range of factors when determining sort order. For example the age of some images can be included as a weighting factor, with older images being demoted, depending on the nature of the search.

 

There's an Almay blog on tagging here https://www.alamy.com/blog/tagging-images-on-alamy

 

Mark

Edited November 6, 2020 by M.Chapman

[Phil Robinson]

Most important - supertags.

Then - tags

Least important - caption. 

Not counted at all - other information (on the optional page)

It makes sense. If you search for eg a tennis player, you get lots of results of other tennis players - because they were playing against that player in the match and are mentioned in the caption. Keep potentially useful info that is not relevant to the image in the optional info.

Edited November 8, 2020 by Phil Robinson

[M.Chapman]

On 05/11/2020 at 18:53, Phil Robinson said:

Most inportant - supertags.

Then - tags

Least important - caption. 

Not counted at all - other information (on the optional page)

It makes sense. If you search for eg a tennis player, you get lots of results of other tennis players - because they were playing against that player in the match and are mentioned in the caption. Keep potentially useful info that is not relevant to the image in the optional info.

 

Interesting. That's not what I saw last time I checked, but that was in May 2020, and with a two keyword phrase as follows;

 

Alamy search for laburnum anagyroides

When I put laburnum anagyroides in the caption only, my freshly uploaded image image appeared at 197 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a super-tag only, the same image appeared at 193 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a tag only, the same image appeared at 288 out of 718 images

 

Maybe Alamy have changed the algoritm weightings again? Or maybe the algorithm behaved differently with a two word phrase? I'll rerun a test with a freshly uploaded image and a single keyword. It will take a few days to get the result. I'll report back.

 

Mark

Edited November 6, 2020 by M.Chapman

[gvallee]

2 hours ago, M.Chapman said:

 

Interesting. That's not what I saw last time I checked, but that was in May 2020, and with a two keyword phrase as follows;

 

Alamy search for laburnum anagyroides

When I put laburnum anagyroides in the caption only, my freshly uploaded image image appeared at 197 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a super-tag only, the same image appeared at 193 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a tag only, the same image appeared at 288 out of 718 images

 

Maybe Alamy have changed the algoritm weightings again? Or maybe the algorithm behaved differently with a two word phrase? I'll rerun a test with a freshly uploaded image and a single keyword. It will take a few days to get the result. I'll report back.

 

Mark

 

Mark, did you also test with the two keywords in caption AND supertag? 

During my last test, it was the most powerful combination.

[NYCat]

1 hour ago, gvallee said:

 

Mark, did you also test with the two keywords in caption AND supertag? 

During my last test, it was the most powerful combination.

 

Me too. That combination has been the best for me.

 

Paulette

[M.Chapman]

12 hours ago, gvallee said:

 

Mark, did you also test with the two keywords in caption AND supertag? 

During my last test, it was the most powerful combination.

Yes.

 

When I put laburnum anagyroides in the caption only, my freshly uploaded image image appeared at 197 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a super-tag only, the same image appeared at 193 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a tag only, the same image appeared at 288 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a supertag and in the caption  the same image appeared at 69 out of 717 images

 

So caption and supertag was best for me too.

 

Mark

[Allan Bell]

I may be wrong, and usually am, but I tend to make the Caption a Super Tag too. Then add others.

 

Allan

 

[meanderingemu]

59 minutes ago, M.Chapman said:

Yes.

 

When I put laburnum anagyroides in the caption only, my freshly uploaded image image appeared at 197 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a super-tag only, the same image appeared at 193 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a tag only, the same image appeared at 288 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a supertag and in the caption  the same image appeared at 69 out of 717 images

 

So caption and supertag was best for me too.

 

Mark

 

interesting as my results weren't as dramatic, i'll have to adjust- though in fairness not many time i needed so many Supertags to make me have to choose away from words in Caption

[M.Chapman]

9 hours ago, meanderingemu said:

 

interesting as my results weren't as dramatic, i'll have to adjust- though in fairness not many time i needed so many Supertags to make me have to choose away from words in Caption

 

How much an image moves depends on how the images you are competing with are tagged and captioned (and potentially lots of other stuff too, for example whether they have been zoomed or not, when they were taken and the other contributors' ranks etc.).

 

Nevertheless, as  simplified example, suppose only the caption and tags matter and your image has the search keyword as a tag only. But all the images you are competing with have the seach keyword as a supertag. If we assume the following the weightings Caption > Supertag > Tag and nothing else is taken into account, (BIG assumptions for the sake of a simple example only), then your image would appear last.

 

Now if you move the search keyword into the caption, the your image should appear first - a massive effect.

 

So the effect of moving a keyword between fields may have different effects for different searches depending on the images you're competing with.

 

For those interested, Alamy filed some patents on search algorithms and image placement a long while ago. No idea if they still use these principles, but it's possible some are still relevant. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f0/46/70/5587061d43a905/GB2424091A.pdf

 

Mark

 

Edited November 7, 2020 by M.Chapman

[gvallee]

8 hours ago, M.Chapman said:

Yes.

 

When I put laburnum anagyroides in the caption only, my freshly uploaded image image appeared at 197 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a super-tag only, the same image appeared at 193 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a tag only, the same image appeared at 288 out of 718 images

When I put laburnum anagyroides as a supertag and in the caption  the same image appeared at 69 out of 717 images

 

So caption and supertag was best for me too.

 

Mark

 

This is exactly in line with my test results. It was a while ago though, I haven't re-tested it recently. Thank you for your input Mark.

[rickygui]

Anyway am on an ongoing check on all my pics, geez, discover spelling errors was the worst! Then redefine or improve captions, fill up missing super Tags to maximum. Is good to look back again after acquiring new knowledge. However is extremely time consuming but worth to do it during this pandemic situation. 

[rickygui]

I just did a random keywords search on my own. Random input was "Singapore rental". Total 653 images appear. The very first image of mine appear on page 1, i counted another 15 images additional images of mine pop up on page 1.

 

let's go back to the 1st image on page 1, i check back what i had input. My caption didn't contain "Singapore rental", no supertags of it. Some of the KW were "office rental, office rental and sale, office for rent" were sufficient enough for the search of "singapore rental". 

It seems for now Keywords weigh a heavier role for me. Although my image is easily searchable but not buyable in the market.