Keywords . Poor discoverability

[Rex44]

Hi All .  I'm returning to Alamy contributing after around a five year break . My main stock is garden/plant images . I keyword my plants with the botanical and common garden name, colour, type of plant, perennial, shrub, tree etc but it still tells me they are hard to discover by searchers . Why could this be ? .

[Roy Q]

Rex,

If you mean the discoverability is showing as "poor", that in itself is, I understand from many contributors on this forum, almost certainly not something to be concerned about. It is based heavily or entirely on the number of keywords you use. On the contrary, you will find lots of advice on other threads advising not to "keyword spam", ie use too many keywords in order to improve the discoverability rating. I found myself possibly guilty of this in my earlier work, and it is understandable  to think it will improve the chances of a sale. However it appears it is more likely to result in searchers finding your pictures but not zooming, and so can negatively affect your CTR rating. Don't be tempted to use terms such as "blue sky", "green", etc unless that is the main point of the image. I really like your backlit peony foliage image. Possibly a few of the others are half a stop dark, and could be lightened in editing, but hopefully more experienced contributors will add further comments.

[NYCat]

Yes, "discoverability" is really meaningless. Check on your Dashboard for views and zooms. Those are what is actually happening.

 

Paulette

[Steve F]

Hi Rex,

+1 what Paulette and Roy said above. Some images look too dark, yes. e.g. 2P8RTF, 2P8FTWH, 2WR025D, 2WR0350 (this is not an exhaustive list)

 

Also, captions are searchable by clients. So you should include the Latin name, common name, location, date etc. Some tips:

https://www.alamy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Captions-and-Tags-checklist.pdf

https://www.alamy.com/blog/tips-for-your-captions-from-the-sales-team

https://www.alamy.com/blog/captions-and-tags

Steve

Edited March 20 by Steve F

[Chris Burrows]

I think that you should ignore the discoverability bit from Alamy but I feel you do need a few more keywords.

Some might disagree but I was advised some time ago that with flowers etc you need to use plurals even when you have a picture of only one flower.

Someone searching for say a tulip might well search for tulips as they want to see lots of tulip pictures.

Other keywords could come from learning more about the flowers you photograph. For example

Image ID: 2NYP7D9   ERANTHIS HYEMALIS (WINTER ACONITE)  You have bulb but eranthis are grown from a tuber but as so many tubers corms etc tend to be called bulbs

I would go for tuber tubers tuberous bulb bulbous' and then they come back each year so hardy perennial perennials 

 Image ID: 2NRHN3B Tulip white triumphator  I would caption that along the lines of Tulipa 'White Triumphator' AGM Tulip Lily-flowered Group and then repeat in keywords with added plurals tulipas tulips and award of garden merit lily flowered hardy perennial perennials bulb bulbs bulbous.

I would also suggest captioning in the standard manner so for this as above capital letter for the first letter of the species name then for the rest of the species name lower case single quotes for the cultivar and capitals for all the main words. So for the ERANTHIS HYEMALIS it would be Eranthis hyemalis.

Not sure of your identification of the tulip though does not look like a lily flowered one to me.

Best place I find to get most names for spelling etc is here....

https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/search-form

I would not bother about the italics though.  My computer seems to ignore them anyway so I just copy and paste from here, very useful for anyone whose spelling is as bad as mine.

Image ID: 2WR03BF  Yellow spring crocus  As with most of your pictures if you can find the cultivar or species full name you will stand a better chance of selling and have more keywords.  Also crocus come from corms so add corm cormous 

 

For most flowers I also tend to add petal petals close up ups closeup closeups unless they are not close up of course and never macro., selective focus if it applies and then there's anther stamen stigma (with plurals) if they are obvious in the picture.