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Instagram hashtag generators - useful on Alamy or not?


Fiona

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Just trying to get back in the Alamy game with my new found passion for lakes and wondering whether Instagram hashtag generators might be useful for Alamy? Sites like metatags where you type in a word or a picture and it gives you all the associated hashtags in order of popularity? There’s a few of them, and they are useful for Instagram but would they translate to Alamy? Is there a better site for choosing Alamy keywords? TIA! 

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personally i have never found a KW generator that wasn't spammy and providing filler KW and unrelated that someone would likely never used for what is in the image.  

 

The best source of KW is AoA which will show you what actual clients used to find their images, and your knowledge of What is in the image.  Then Wikipedia has loads of info.   I will also sometimes when i have a subject i am not comfortable look at some of the results form other contributor to be inspired.  

 

 

 

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Keywording is my least favourite part of the process of getting images for sale on alamy, ans I am not the only one who doesn't like it. That said, it is also the most important. We have had discussions here before about keyword generators. The few people who had experience said the same thing - the automated generator comes up with so many irrelevant (or words that are so loosely associated with the file as to be effectively irrelevant) words. And keyword spamming is a great way of ensuring that your photos won't get seen. By all means give it a try but in my own experience the best way is the hardest - do it by hand. Its an arcane science but very important. I use Adobe Bridge and have all sorts of templates for various subjects to make the process easier.

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1 hour ago, Fiona said:

Just trying to get back in the Alamy game with my new found passion for lakes


It is generally considered  best to take a minimalist approach to tagging. In this case, specifying the lakes by name and general location in the tags is more likely to get your images seen than a load of generic keywords. 

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1 hour ago, Colin Woods said:

Keywording is my least favourite part of the process of getting images for sale on alamy, ans I am not the only one who doesn't like it. That said, it is also the most important. We have had discussions here before about keyword generators. The few people who had experience said the same thing - the automated generator comes up with so many irrelevant (or words that are so loosely associated with the file as to be effectively irrelevant) words. And keyword spamming is a great way of ensuring that your photos won't get seen. By all means give it a try but in my own experience the best way is the hardest - do it by hand. Its an arcane science but very important. I use Adobe Bridge and have all sorts of templates for various subjects to make the process easier.

Thanks, good to know. When you say you use Bridge, how do you use it in your workflow? 

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MDM, who replied above, has a formidable understanding of Lightroom. If you use Lightroom then MDM can get you started on keywording there. I personally prefer DxO Optics for my RAW conversion and I use Bridge as my file organisation, for all my files not just photos. When I pull photos from my memory card I use Bridge to view them and delete the rubbish. When I have whittled them down to the keepers I keyword in Bridge (in the Metadata tab), then into DxO to convert the RAW to an image. When you click Metadata (this is the list of menus at the top right - you have Essentials, Filmstrip, Output, Metadata...) you will have a window that opens with two tabs - Metadata and Keywords. Under Keywords you can create all your templates - there are youtube videos. Under Metadata is all the various fields that are associated with the image. The one for keywording is IPTC Core. For Alamy the caption is the Description field and the keywords (tags) go in the Keywords field. Alamy supports multi-word tags so separate your words with commas carefully. For example if I want to have Quebec City as a tag then I make sure there is no comma between Quebec and City. If I put the comma between those two words then they will come into alamy as two separate keywords.

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i do my KW in my photo editing process.  as i went along, i have created KW lists, so for example if i cover a protest i have a preset for that.   In addition i link KWs.  So when i add England it automatically adds UK and United Kingdom.  same for US/uk spelling colour is linked to color

  etc.  

it's lots of effort up front, be makes it easier for subject you regularly cover. 

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3 hours ago, MDM said:


It is generally considered  best to take a minimalist approach to tagging. In this case, specifying the lakes by name and general location in the tags is more likely to get your images seen than a load of generic keywords. 

What’s your workflow for key wording? 

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1 hour ago, Colin Woods said:

MDM, who replied above, has a formidable understanding of Lightroom. If you use Lightroom then MDM can get you started on keywording there. I personally prefer DxO Optics for my RAW conversion and I use Bridge as my file organisation, for all my files not just photos. When I pull photos from my memory card I use Bridge to view them and delete the rubbish. When I have whittled them down to the keepers I keyword in Bridge (in the Metadata tab), then into DxO to convert the RAW to an image. When you click Metadata (this is the list of menus at the top right - you have Essentials, Filmstrip, Output, Metadata...) you will have a window that opens with two tabs - Metadata and Keywords. Under Keywords you can create all your templates - there are youtube videos. Under Metadata is all the various fields that are associated with the image. The one for keywording is IPTC Core. For Alamy the caption is the Description field and the keywords (tags) go in the Keywords field. Alamy supports multi-word tags so separate your words with commas carefully. For example if I want to have Quebec City as a tag then I make sure there is no comma between Quebec and City. If I put the comma between those two words then they will come into alamy as two separate keywords.

        

Thanks for the compliment Colin. I do have a decent understanding of Lightroom (Classic not the other one which I have ignored) but I am not an expert in keywording I'm afraid.  Once upon a time I used to keep up with keywording as I went along but sadly that is a long time ago. In fact I hate keywording and currently have a load of images which have passed QC ages ago waiting to be tagged. I do input basic location metadata on import to Lightroom which allows me to find stuff easily later. It sounds like meanderingemu has a good approach in comparison to mine although I don't know what software he uses.

 

One thing I would say is that for anyone who use Lightroom, keywording in Bridge is not a good idea as Lightroom has all of the same features (metadata templates etc). The big difference is that Lightroom is far far faster in terms of searching the database. Having used Bridge until 2013, there is no comparison in my opinion. 

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9 minutes ago, Fiona said:

What’s your workflow for key wording? 

 

Just answered that as you posted. Actually that applies to my landscape stuff that I put on Alamy. I have a different approach to other types of photography. With weddings, I keyword by parts of the day so I can find stuff easily. With dogs, I keyword by breed.  I am just updating my website having moved to a new provider and I am very glad I keyworded the dogs as it has made life a lot easier.

 

My advice would be to keyword in Lightroom and keep up with it as you go along. I have a huge catalog of landscape images and the only metadata for a lot of them is location. I rely on memory after that which may not be a great idea going forwards.

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I use both Lightroom Classic keywords and also add keywords in Alamy Image Manager.  My Lightroom keywords are set up so I can find things:  people, type of location shot (mountains with volcanoes as a sub keyword, street scenes, political and religious demonstrations, etc.).   Birds are subdivided by families and sometimes species; orchids are by genius and some species; food.   I apply my keywords after I cull the shots.  I can tag quickly from the keyword list.   I have several locations inside Nicaragua, Mexico, the US by state or county.  My pets are by name, so those tags I eliminate when I submit those photos to Alamy.  Keywords inside keywords  will show as separate tags in AIM. 

 

Different ways to do this.  My LrC keywords are so I can find my photos, but I have occasionally added a caption and more keywords in Lightroom Classic so that photos go straight to sale when they're approved by Quality Control. 

 

Spending time with All of Alamy is useful.  As much as Alamy is overloaded with cat photos, a lot of people do search for those.  As with people, cats doing things seem to get more attention than static cats.  Landscapes tend to be searched by locations.  Historical buildings will be searched by name or type (Elizabethan, Colonial American, Victorian).  Seasons of the year also matter, especially for calendar sales.  All of Alamy top searches compared to All of Alamy searches with few results (first 10 pages compared to pages beginning with around page 9,000) will be educational, too. 

 

 

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