Singular and Plural keywords.

[Allan Bell]

During keywording we, the contributors, have been putting keywords in to describe our images as both singular and plural. I believe we have been told in the past that this is necessary in getting our images seen.

 

I have recently been loading images to a wall art site whose search engine has recently been updated such that it will look for both singular AND plural keywords. It now pulls out any image with EITHER a singular keyword OR a plural keyword which is a great help to their contributors.

 

Would it be possible to upgrade the Alamy search engine to provide the same facility for their contributors?

 

Allan

 

[geogphotos]

I think the problem is that singular words are often used generically. 

 

For example, 'dog training' might include more than one dog,

 

But also plural forms can be singular! eg) 'feeding birds' might only show one bird. 

Edited March 4, 2021 by geogphotos

[Graham]

Looking at my searches and zooms, buyers look for terms such as “African animals”, which seems to mean the same to some searchers as “African wildlife” - a search for “animals” does not always imply that the end product must have more than one animal in it:  imprecise though this is, this is how we speak, and how some people search.  On a POD site to which I contribute, a popular search item is “beaches”: could anyone rationally think that the buyers are looking for images with more than one beach, as opposed to those which show only a single beach?  I think it would be beneficial for searches automatically to pick up singular and plural versions. 
 

Graham

[NYCat]

2 hours ago, Graham said:

Looking at my searches and zooms, buyers look for terms such as “African animals”, which seems to mean the same to some searchers as “African wildlife” - a search for “animals” does not always imply that the end product must have more than one animal in it:  imprecise though this is, this is how we speak, and how some people search.  On a POD site to which I contribute, a popular search item is “beaches”: could anyone rationally think that the buyers are looking for images with more than one beach, as opposed to those which show only a single beach?  I think it would be beneficial for searches automatically to pick up singular and plural versions. 
 

Graham

 

I believe they used to do that but had a reason to stop it. It would be helpful if I could remember that reason but I can't. I try to always put both singular and plural in keywords.

 

Paulette

[MizBrown]

They won't stem singular and plural but are happy to tear single words out of captions and multi word tags, combine them with stray prepositions ("on" is, apparently, the same as "in") and generally make it impossible to use tags longer than a single word without some absurd mix and match that doesn't get the customer what they were looking for but which can't be revised to stop delivering irrelevant photos.