Tags and keywords

[Stokie]

23 hours ago, Brian Vickers said:

Thanks….yes batch tagging ….Ill abandon that….thought I was being expedient…not taken personally at all…thanks!

As spacecadet says, batch tagging has it's place.

 

I usually batch tag groups of images of the same subject once they have passed QC, just to get them on sale, but usually only generic terms, then go through them later fine tuning my keywords and captions.

 

John.

[M.Chapman]

15 hours ago, Brian Vickers said:

I’ve started to go back through my uploads to delete any excessive tags….I hope my reputation within the algorithm is recoverable.  I still have *** QC ranking.

Your Alamy QC star rating is only based on whether your images pass Alamy's quality inspection. Alamy don't look at captions and tags.

 

But you also have an "Alamy rank" which is used to help determine the placement of your images in searches. Alamy don't disclose all the details of how Alamy rank is calculated, but it's believed to include your CTR% (ratio of zooms to views - see graph on your dashboard). Redundant keywords will increase views, but irrelevant images are unlikely to be zoomed, so CTR% will fall. This in turn is likely to degrade your Alamy rank and in turn your images are likely to appear lower down in search results. (That's how it's supposed to work anyway).

 

Mark

Edited March 24 by M.Chapman

[jbphoto]

Hi!

Aside from caption and keywords, does anyone pay attention to filling in the optional fields?

I always fill in the Location, as I think some buyers may want to ensure the photo was taken at in a specific country/place. Is that plausible?

 

And when it comes to "Number of people in the image " and Primary/Secondary category, what benefit can I expect if I fill in with the most appropriate values, vs doing a quick job (or even not doing it at all) ? 

[wiskerke]

22 hours ago, jbphoto said:

Hi!

Aside from caption and keywords, does anyone pay attention to filling in the optional fields?

I always fill in the Location, as I think some buyers may want to ensure the photo was taken at in a specific country/place. Is that plausible?

 

And when it comes to "Number of people in the image " and Primary/Secondary category, what benefit can I expect if I fill in with the most appropriate values, vs doing a quick job (or even not doing it at all) ? 

How the system uses optional fields changes from time to time.

We think Location is not searchable, however it sets the USA/EU/UK/Australia filter.

The same with Number of people in the image: WP/WOP.

This weekend I had a zoom for this search: Public garden [Europe] .

The brackets indicate it was a filter set by the client.

Europe is not in my keywords, but it is in Location.

 

wim

[Brian Vickers]

On 24/03/2024 at 14:09, M.Chapman said:

Your Alamy QC star rating is only based on whether your images pass Alamy's quality inspection. Alamy don't look at captions and tags.

 

But you also have an "Alamy rank" which is used to help determine the placement of your images in searches. Alamy don't disclose all the details of how Alamy rank is calculated, but it's believed to include your CTR% (ratio of zooms to views - see graph on your dashboard). Redundant keywords will increase views, but irrelevant images are unlikely to be zoomed, so CTR% will fall. This in turn is likely to degrade your Alamy rank and in turn your images are likely to appear lower down in search results. (That's how it's supposed to work anyway).

 

Mark

Is it possible to see our 'Rank' or just the QC rank....I cant find it anywhere?

[Harry Harrison]

23 hours ago, jbphoto said:

And when it comes to "Number of people in the image " and Primary/Secondary category, what benefit can I expect if I fill in with the most appropriate values, vs doing a quick job (or even not doing it at all) ? 

Difficult to say how much this might matter but if you have entered an image as having no models and no releases in that optional tab then it will automatically go into the 'Vital' Creative section. Similarly if there are models and/or property and you have releases (for either or bothwhere applicable) but then of course you would certainly enter that anyway.

 

If you don't fill in the model and property details (even if you have no releases or there are no models or property in the picture) then it will stay in Uncut. There is also no way for you to see whether you have entered that information apart from going into each image in turn, the csv data download returns the same data whether you have or not. This was supposed to have been fixed, or at least looked at, but it must be pretty low on the list if it is on there at all.

 

Goodness knows what use is made of Primary and Secondary Categories, if any, we haven't been told. So many enter something just to be on the safe side.

 

Edited March 25 by Harry Harrison

[Harry Harrison]

23 hours ago, jbphoto said:

I always fill in the Location, as I think some buyers may want to ensure the photo was taken at in a specific country/place. Is that plausible?

As Wim says, it is used for the Location filter, as far as I know it looks for the specific text 'UK', 'USA', 'Europe' or 'Australia' in that field for that purpose, so I don't think that 'EU' would work but you could test it. If you have entered something then that field will display below the image in the image details page though.

[M.Chapman]

1 hour ago, Brian Vickers said:

Is it possible to see our 'Rank' or just the QC rank....I cant find it anywhere?

Not directly. But you can gain an insight by doing some test searches for your images. Enter one of your keywords into the search box on the main Alamy site. Note how many images are returned in total, and then scan through the thumbnails until you find the first of your images and note its position. Try this a number of times with different keywords to gain an insight into how your images are being positioned relative to the competition. Keep a record of the results, and then repeat the test at some future date to see if anything has changed. There is another way called the "BHZ test" (search for BHZ on the forum). Alamy say this can't be relied on, but I've found it useful for identifying when reranks have occurred and this has helped explain sudden changes in my numbers of views.

 

Mark

Edited March 25 by M.Chapman

[Brian Vickers]

Thanks Mark!

[jbphoto]

57 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

This weekend I had a zoom for this search: Public garden [Europe] .

The brackets indicate it was a filter set by the client.

 

 

Interesting. I looked for similar searches. I have none, that include a location inside brackets.

 

However, I have a search appearing as [Land] [Pt] [Sq]. Now I wonder which photos are neither landscape, portrait nor square ...

[Steve F]

1 hour ago, wiskerke said:

Europe is not in my keywords, but it is in Location.

 

Arrggghhh. I never have Europe in my location. Just England / UK. Do you think this is a problem?

[M.Chapman]

45 minutes ago, Steve F said:

 

Arrggghhh. I never have Europe in my location. Just England / UK. Do you think this is a problem?

Possibly not, the 4 filter buttons show UK, Europe, USA and Australia as being separate filters. So if customer wants UK & Europe they can click both buttons. They would have to do this as a quick test shows clicking Europe filter only doesn't include images with only UK in tags/location. Mmm... I thought we'd only left the EU, not the European geographic region.

 

Mark

Edited March 25 by M.Chapman

[Steve F]

10 minutes ago, M.Chapman said:

Possibly not, the 4 filter buttons show UK, Europe, USA and Australia as being separate filters. So if customer wants UK & Europe can click both buttons. They would have to do this as a quick test shows clicking Europe filter only doesn't include images with only UK in tags/location. Mmm... I thought we'd only left the EU, not the European geographic region.

 

Mark

 

Travel agents in the UK have always had a European holidays section...

[wiskerke]

7 hours ago, Steve F said:

 

Arrggghhh. I never have Europe in my location. Just England / UK. Do you think this is a problem?

 

I don't have many images with it either. US yes, but the filter says USA. If Europe will pick up EU I don't know. But I will now start going over some of my images and add Asia; Africa; Latin America (or South America?). Because before you know it, this may be picked up by a filter also.

It reminds me very much of my 6 year old self describing my address: Amsterdam; Netherlands; Europe; Earth; Universe.

 

I can see it making a difference when clients are searching for pretty generic stuff like metro station [Latin America] or SUV in the mountains [USA] or market town [UK].

 

wim

[Harry Harrison]

I did a quick test and 'EU' in Location is not picked up by the 'Europe' filter.

[Ognyan Yosifov]

28 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

I did a quick test and 'EU' in Location is not picked up by the 'Europe' filter.

I wonder if "Eastern Europe" would be picked up under the "Europe" filter 

Edited March 26 by Ognyan Yosifov

[Harry Harrison]

3 minutes ago, Ognyan Yosifov said:

I wonder if "Eastern Europe" will be picked up under the "Europe" filter 

I think it would, I think it just looks for the text string " Europe ".

[Ognyan Yosifov]

1 minute ago, Harry Harrison said:

I think it would, I think it just looks for the text string " Europe ".

Yes, Harry, it does! I just did the test. 👍

[Harry Harrison]

3 minutes ago, Ognyan Yosifov said:

Yes, Harry, it does! I just did the test. 👍

I do wonder how useful this Location filter is to researchers. An open search for 'europe' brings up 22,869,855 images. Apply the Europe' location filter and it goes down to 1,030,452. Quite a difference. Still, much like the Categories I don't know how they can change or add to the current list as it would require retrospective correction by contributors, unless Artificial Intelligence gets involved!

[Ognyan Yosifov]

6 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

I do wonder how useful this Location filter is to researchers. An open search for 'europe' brings up 22,869,855 images. Apply the Europe' location filter and it goes down to 1,030,452. Quite a difference. Still, much like the Categories I don't know how they can change or add to the current list as it would require retrospective correction by contributors, unless Artificial Intelligence gets involved!

I don't know. I usually put locations in the caption and as keywords. The searches depend on the researcher's determination, so it's a "hit-or-miss" thing

[Harry Harrison]

1 minute ago, Ognyan Yosifov said:

I don't know. I usually put locations in the caption and as keywords. The searches depend on the researcher's determination, so it's a "hit-or-miss" thing

It's a good idea in principle because there might be reasons why 'Europe' might be in the captions or keywords when the Location isn't actually in Europe, the same with the other options but the ratio of 20:1 suggests that the vast majority of images where the Location is genuinely in Europe don't have it entered in the Location field.

[Ognyan Yosifov]

16 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

It's a good idea in principle because there might be reasons why 'Europe' might be in the captions or keywords when the Location isn't actually in Europe, the same with the other options but the ratio of 20:1 suggests that the vast majority of images where the Location is genuinely in Europe don't have it entered in the Location field.

+1

[wiskerke]

3 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

It's a good idea in principle because there might be reasons why 'Europe' might be in the captions or keywords when the Location isn't actually in Europe, the same with the other options but the ratio of 20:1 suggests that the vast majority of images where the Location is genuinely in Europe don't have it entered in the Location field.

Clever!

However I tend to look for what clients are actually using.

Same for ordinary keywords btw.

The problem with this: you wouldn't pick it up except when it's already in your keywords somewhere. With keywords theoretically it's possible to ferret those out researching AoA. The filter settings only turn up in our own Pseudonym Summary.

And those can be mysterious. This month I had a search for theater [YoungAdult]. One image (GKNBXP) had been viewed, but was not zoomed.

When I tried that search myself without a filter the image was on page 1, but another one of mine was higher up on the same page. With the Young adult filter both images had gone.

Wt..??? Young adult was not a keyword. Nor any age anywhere.

Besides: where would I set Young adult? Which in the Pseudonym Summary is called [YoungAdult]. Consistency is not a strong point.

Now if I would have an image with a young adult in it (I don't think I have) should I keyword YoungAdult or young adult? Because there is no age field anywhere. My guess is that contributing agencies do have fields that are being used under the hood/bonnet. Do we have access to those fields/filter settings by using the same term as a keyword? As I said mysterious.

 

wim

[Harry Harrison]

33 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

When I tried that search myself without a filter the image was on page 1, but another one of mine was higher up on the same page. With the Young adult filter both images had gone.

Interesting, have those Age filters always been there since the new AIM, or even before? I must say that I haven't paid any attention to them.

 

For reference they are - Baby, Toddler, Child, Teenager, Young Adult, Adult, Senior Adult.

 

A very quick search using the Young Adult filter found an image which was indeed of a young adult but he was described as a 'young man' in the caption, no mention of 'adult' anywhere. Same for a picture with 'young woman' in the caption.

[Harry Harrison]

This Alamy Blog post from 6/2/18 mentions them:

https://www.alamy.com/blog/use-search-filters-alamy

 

"Age – set the age range of the people who feature in the image. There are a several options available ranging from ‘baby’ to ‘senior’ and everything in-between."

 

Oddly Australia has been left out of the (limited) list of possible options for the Location filter.

 

"Search for images taken in any of these three locations: USA, UK and Europe."