The obvious tagging question

[Dave Colman]

I get stuck when it comes to tagging, having read the forum bits it seems as though reaching the full 50 is not an absolute must although I do want to get as much in as possible. 
But often when I am doing my tagging the mind just goes blank, I can never think of the words I really need, and whilst I appreciate I can go back and add at a later time I would ask your advice.
How do you go about planning your tags to get a good coverage ?
thanks in advance for any replies.

[Chuck Nacke]

5 hours ago, Dave Colman said:

I get stuck when it comes to tagging, having read the forum bits it seems as though reaching the full 50 is not an absolute must although I do want to get as much in as possible. 
But often when I am doing my tagging the mind just goes blank, I can never think of the words I really need, and whilst I appreciate I can go back and add at a later time I would ask your advice.
How do you go about planning your tags to get a good coverage ?
thanks in advance for any replies.

I am not the be person contributing to Alamy to hand out advice on "Tagging" but I will tell you that I spend a lot of time prepping images in Lightroom (LR) and Photoshop (PS)

and I spend just as much time or more researching the history and news of locations.  I concentrate on Who, What, Where, When and How, also known as the five Ws.  

 

I go through the information I find and underline what I believe to be important "Keywords" or tags.  The internet has made this type of work vastly easier.  In the old days

I had stacks of reference books.

 

FYI I have spent a bit of time in China, mostly Beijing and Xian and I always enjoyed the time I spent there.

 

Chuck

[Dave Colman]

27 minutes ago, Chuck Nacke said:

I am not the be person contributing to Alamy to hand out advice on "Tagging" but I will tell you that I spend a lot of time prepping images in Lightroom (LR) and Photoshop (PS)

and I spend just as much time or more researching the history and news of locations.  I concentrate on Who, What, Where, When and How, also known as the five Ws.  

 

I go through the information I find and underline what I believe to be important "Keywords" or tags.  The internet has made this type of work vastly easier.  In the old days

I had stacks of reference books.

 

FYI I have spent a bit of time in China, mostly Beijing and Xian and I always enjoyed the time I spent there.

 

Chuck

Thank you, I don't do much in photoshop as I'm old school and try hard to get the image done first time but I think I need to spend a lot of time researching my images. I try to do unusual places or different views. Of course not always easy to find info over here and as I have found even asking local people I am getting a blank, often nobody knows. 
I will try harder.

[gvallee]

I use a mixture of templates/keywords hierarchy in Bridge. So relevant keywords for a concept are linked.

For example, if I'm tagging a landscape, I have to click only once the box of the 'Landscape' template to pick up the following tags in one go:

Landscape, nobody, view, vista, scenic, picturesque

Etc

[Chuck Nacke]

Dave,

 

I am not as good as I should be, but a reporters note book and a pen are always with me.

I always have to remind myself to ask and take notes,  It is a lot easier in the digital days then

it was before the internet and DSLR's.  One old habit that I still do is carry a couple of cards with

scenic pictures so that if you are stopped photographing something sensitive you can switch

them out.  In the old days we carried dummy rolls of film that could be swapped if there was

any problem. 

 

Chuck

 

Sorry Dave,

 

A lot of my work was done in conflict zones in Russia and central Asia,  Nasty places where people pointed guns

at you and demanded your film.  Never once did I have any problem taking pictures in China, but I was 

not covering "News"

Edited January 22, 2021 by Chuck Nacke
addition

[Radim]

First, I would include important words like China or Turkey in the caption

[Dave Colman]

23 minutes ago, Chuck Nacke said:

Dave,

 

I am not as good as I should be, but a reporters note book and a pen are always with me.

I always have to remind myself to ask and take notes,  It is a lot easier in the digital days then

it was before the internet and DSLR's.  One old habit that I still do is carry a couple of cards with

scenic pictures so that if you are stopped photographing something sensitive you can switch

them out.  In the old days we carried dummy rolls of film that could be swapped if there was

any problem. 

 

Chuck

 

Sorry Dave,

 

A lot of my work was done in conflict zones in Russia and central Asia,  Nasty places where people pointed guns

at you and demanded your film.  Never once did I have any problem taking pictures in China, but I was 

not covering "News"

yes, notebook and pen I do carry. I have only had an issue once in China years ago when I was approached by police and asked for my memory card as I was photographing an old building which they thought too bad for a westerner to see. what they didn't know was I had just swapped cards so it only had 2 or 3 images on it.
in my local town people are nothing but friendly so far and it's great to walk around taking photos. I made the local Chinadaily site this week so I think I am getting known around the area.
the President is visiting the city later in the year so I want to get plenty of images up before then, hopefully it will be on the searches at the time. 100th anniversary of the communist party starting and they met in my town initially. I expect there will be big celebrations to photograph

[Dave Colman]

35 minutes ago, gvallee said:

I use a mixture of templates/keywords hierarchy in Bridge. So relevant keywords for a concept are linked.

For example, if I'm tagging a landscape, I have to click only once the box of the 'Landscape' template to pick up the following tags in one go:

Landscape, nobody, view, vista, scenic, picturesque

Etc

thanks, sounds like it will help. I will also need to source some more unusual and specific words to stand out a bit I suppose, although a lot of my images are of the more unusual places anyway. 

[gvallee]

2 minutes ago, Dave Colman said:

thanks, sounds like it will help. I will also need to source some more unusual and specific words to stand out a bit I suppose, although a lot of my images are of the more unusual places anyway. 

 

Here you are. I would then create a template along the lines of 'unusual, remote, isolated, Chinese, out of the beaten track, out of the beaten path' or equivalent. You can have as many templates as you like.

[Mr Standfast]

2 hours ago, Dave Colman said:

the President is visiting the city later in the year so I want to get plenty of images up before then, hopefully it will be on the searches at the time. 100th anniversary of the communist party starting and they met in my town initially. I expect there will be big celebrations to photograph

 

 

Commendable idea. This is the sort of editorial stock Alamy is good at.  Good luck.

[Sandi]

I find it useful to keep a text list of various topics which are likely to get repeated, such as places, plant or animal names

eg,

Beaudesert, town, Queensland, Australia, scenic rim council, war memorial, 53km south of Brisbane, Mount Lindsay Highway, between Albert and Logan rivers, Great War, population 7000, cross-roads, rural
bird of paradise flower, flower, petals, sun lit, garden, orange, red, purple, strelitzia, blossom, bright, exotic
Bismarck palm, Bismarckia nobilis, native to Madagascar
black bean tree, seed pods, large, heavy,  castanospermum australe, rainforest, queensland, australia
blue faced honeyeater, Entomyzon cyanotisbird, exotic, honeyeater, olive, white, blue, flowers, shrub, wild, feathers, queensland, australia

........

It's better to have too many words in this list rather than not enough. It's easy to copy in the whole lot to the tags bar, then delete any you don't need.

It takes time to accumulate the list but saves time eventually.

Sandi

 

[wiskerke]

Do include UK and US English; words and spelling.

In your case include all possible transcriptions both historic and current. Maybe even include German, French and Spanish transcriptions.

And look it up in AoA to see if clients are actually using the sort of keywords you want to include and if they mean the same thing.

 

wim

 

 

[Cal]

Great advice handed out already so not much to add from me except to not underestimate the importance of key phrases. For instance "canada goose", "canada geese" along with "goose", "geese" but omitting the singular keyword "canada" so as to not lead to false searches. Entirely up to you but this is what I do, and then for subjects where the key phrase and the individual words have high relevance I include both along with the plural and singular where appropriate. So, as an example "old car" and "old" "car". This can often lead to a high number of keywords without unnecessary spamming, at a rough guess I usually end up with about 30-40 KW just by including variations in spelling, past tense, present tense (where applicable) etc.

 

One final thing it looks like your images are all set to RF (the alamy default) with unreleased property and people in, and the ones I checked not having the explicit editorial only restriction on them. Perhaps you have this in hand (and I do wonder if alamy has safeguarding in place for this given RF is its default setting) but I thought I'd just let you know. Great selection of images, BTW.

[MizBrown]

10 hours ago, Dave Colman said:

I think I need to spend a lot of time researching my images.

 

Wikipedia and general Google searches are useful.   I found one of the houses I photographed in the US through Google and a couple of different articles gave me the house's history (when built, who was born there, etc.).  My Nicaragua dog walker and shopper told me that one house I photographed in Jinotega, Nicaragua, was the oldest unmodified and unmodernized houses in town.  The app Seek and Wikipedia have more fungus identifications than I expected.  

 

Second the recommendation for checking against All of Alamy for what sorts of tags/keywords buyers use.   Looking at the searchers that turn up relatively few results (zero results tend to be misspellings but not always) can be useful. 

 

One search I noticed showing up was Nicaragua Sign Language.   No posts were relevant to what the search was for.   I had access to a refuge for deaf children who used Nicaraguan Sign Language -- 3 zooms and one license.   The refuge is a couple of blocks from where I live.  

 

Also, check "What should I Shoot" can be useful if you have photos matching a search but aren't using the search term given in the list.  Use that for a tag and check off that you have a photo of the item or creature being searched for.

 

If you're photographing a workshop or factory, ask questions about the processes.  

[John David]

For keywording, I firstly add the word "editorial" if it is required, then I add the 5 W's. Then, looking for inspiration, I check out a variety of keywording websites. 
I make good use of the Photomechanic software. It's very intuitive, fast and adapts to my own workflow.
I ingest with photomechanic. then import to Lightroom where I make basic adjustments, then I export from Lightroom before making tweaks in Photoshop if necessary. I then keyword / tag / add other metadata in Photomechanic which I use to save my file as a 100% quality jpg, ready to upload via FTP to the stock agencies.
I might or might not have made use of the microstock keyword tool, but I couldn't possible confirm that.
Hope that helps.

[Jennifer Ferber]

May I ask a question re a question?  What is the "microstock keyword tool"? What would you consider unnecessary keywords? Does it help or hinder to use alternate spellings, such as "Harbour" and "Harbor". Thank you for your input!

[Dave Colman]

I know it's very early days for my uploads and as most are in and around China will be limited in popularity but what should I consider average views? Is there a rough average per month  100 images for example?

[Steve F]

On 02/02/2021 at 02:44, Dave Colman said:

I know it's very early days for my uploads and as most are in and around China will be limited in popularity but what should I consider average views? Is there a rough average per month  100 images for example?

 

Depends on your collection. I get about 100 views a day for 3000 pictures at the moment.

[MizBrown]

I don't think China would be of limited interest.  Also, yes, to British and American spellings and different terms used to the same item.  

[Dave Colman]

I'm a bit confused about the RF vs RM, so for now I have left it on the default. Could someone give me a brief explanation of when I should change or select it differently to the default please.

[Steve F]

1 hour ago, Dave Colman said:

I'm a bit confused about the RF vs RM, so for now I have left it on the default. Could someone give me a brief explanation of when I should change or select it differently to the default please.

 

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/10911-rights-managed-or-royalty-free/?ct=1612512539

 

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/13103-rm-vs-rf/?sortby=date

 

[Dave Colman]

Thanks, so am I right in thinking RF for my images as they are available on another site. But for images I upload from now on they will be Alamy exclusive so I can make them RM

 

[Steve F]

Sounds right to me