TokyoM1ke Posted January 17, 2015 Share Posted January 17, 2015 I'm a use quotes and other modifiers person but I know that a lot of people don't know. On a different front, isn't the correct name for WSM: Weston-Super-Mare (i.e. with the dashes)? If so, I'd have thought that the best thing to do would be to have both the properly spelled name and the separate words in the keywords... plus perhaps some obvious misspellings. I presume that the average picture searcher gets the spelling correct (other than foreign spellings). It must be a bit of a nightmare for Alamy to find the correct balance between how we interpret images when it comes to keywording them and how the researchers search for images... on further reflection, there are so many ways to slice this one up that it's created companies that specialise in it... Google, for example. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted January 17, 2015 Share Posted January 17, 2015 I'm a use quotes and other modifiers person but I know that a lot of people don't know. On a different front, isn't the correct name for WSM: Weston-Super-Mare (i.e. with the dashes)? If so, I'd have thought that the best thing to do would be to have both the properly spelled name and the separate words in the keywords... plus perhaps some obvious misspellings. I presume that the average picture searcher gets the spelling correct (other than foreign spellings). It must be a bit of a nightmare for Alamy to find the correct balance between how we interpret images when it comes to keywording them and how the researchers search for images... on further reflection, there are so many ways to slice this one up that it's created companies that specialise in it... Google, for example. You could check All of Alamy for spellings that have been used last year: %west%mare% It's a tie: weston super mare 17 weston-super-mare 17 western supermare 1 western super mare 1 wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TokyoM1ke Posted January 18, 2015 Share Posted January 18, 2015 On a different front, isn't the correct name for WSM: Weston-Super-Mare (i.e. with the dashes)? If so, I'd have thought that the best thing to do would be to have both the properly spelled name and the separate words in the keywords... plus perhaps some obvious misspellings. I presume that the average picture searcher gets the spelling correct (other than foreign spellings). They don't! Certainly not when hyphens should be used. I already reported this problem but it falls on deaf ears (or how do you say this in English) See here (once more): http://discussion.alamy.com/index.php?/topic/2670-losing-time-and-sales-with/ Cheers, Philippe PS: shouldn't links open in a different page? "... falls on deaf ears" is a normal English expression. Yes, I see what you mean. Alamy really could improve their search engine then. Something a little more predictive. I can think of 100s of ways in which they could make searches more intuitive and better suited to foreigners (with respect to the country of origin of the photograph and the photographer) but I wonder if it would have a significant impact on their bottom line? Probably not, so everyone submitting images here will continue to have to play the Alamy keywording game. At least there is plenty of room for "centres" and "centers", "pavements" and "sidewalks", and so on... I have yet to come close to filling the comprehensive keywords section... perhaps if I lived in Wales (they seem to have a few rather long place names), or specialised in Sri Lankan portraiture (some very long family names)? [resisting temptation to list any potential improvements in this thread] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted January 21, 2015 Share Posted January 21, 2015 I'm a use quotes and other modifiers person but I know that a lot of people don't know. On a different front, isn't the correct name for WSM: Weston-Super-Mare (i.e. with the dashes)? If so, I'd have thought that the best thing to do would be to have both the properly spelled name and the separate words in the keywords... plus perhaps some obvious misspellings. I presume that the average picture searcher gets the spelling correct (other than foreign spellings). It must be a bit of a nightmare for Alamy to find the correct balance between how we interpret images when it comes to keywording them and how the researchers search for images... on further reflection, there are so many ways to slice this one up that it's created companies that specialise in it... Google, for example. You could check All of Alamy for spellings that have been used last year: %west%mare% It's a tie: weston super mare 17 weston-super-mare 17 western supermare 1 western super mare 1 wim %west%mare% Now there's a good example of the benefits of using a search string modifier! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFL Posted February 6, 2015 Author Share Posted February 6, 2015 Since this thread, I have been using quotation marks in order to make certain keywords to stay together to see how it works out. Now I found that in some images some keywords (no quotation marks) are also shown as one keyword when viewed. What is going on? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted February 6, 2015 Share Posted February 6, 2015 Since this thread, I have been using quotation marks in order to make certain keywords to stay together to see how it works out. Now I found that in some images some keywords (no quotation marks) are also shown as one keyword when viewed. What is going on? Do you have an example? wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFL Posted February 6, 2015 Author Share Posted February 6, 2015 Hi Wim an example would be EEXN7N. In the keywords section, you will find beautiful peaceful boat boats as one, late afternoon early evening as one and var paca as one. It's not just this image, I came across more. Thanks Edit: underlined the keywords Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted February 6, 2015 Share Posted February 6, 2015 The filter picks up the wrong quotation marks. Or it picks them up twice. We have seen this problem before. Until now it always seemed to be input errors: wrong spaces. If this time the filter does pick up the quotation marks twice, that would be a new problem. We have seen that the quotation marks do not have to be immediately next to a word. Or that some characters are omitted by the system. Which would mean that a quotation mark initially did precede a character, just that now it's missing. Example: some of us found out that "-more by Wim Wiskerke" would bring that keyphrase to the front of the visible keywords, and was clickable. (Don't bother: it does not work anymore.) Now the system ignores the hyphen - here, and "-Wim Wiskerke" appears alphabetically in it's right place in the visible keywords. (More was not a searchable word.) visible: beach, beautiful peaceful boat boats, corniche des maures, cote dazur, enjoying, france, french riviera, golden light, late afternoon early evening, le lavandou, mediterranean sea, people, provence-alpes-cote dazur, sitting, sun, var paca real: "le lavandou" beach people sitting enjoying sun late afternoon early evening "Mediterranean sea" "golden light" beautiful peaceful boat boats "Cote d'Azur" "Corniche des Maures" "French Riviera" Var PACA "Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur" france wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFL Posted February 6, 2015 Author Share Posted February 6, 2015 Thanks, Wim. With this image, as you pointed out it was my input error, i.e., double spaces. The double spaces occurred both where keywords were wrapped around in the box. I had better check the other images, too. Many thanks again, a greeny for you. Sung Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jill Morgan Posted February 6, 2015 Share Posted February 6, 2015 If you put in a comma when you keyworded, then it will keep the words between the commas together, same as if you used quotes. Jill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted February 6, 2015 Share Posted February 6, 2015 If you put in a comma when you keyworded, then it will keep the words between the commas together, same as if you used quotes. Jill That is great news. If this means, that in the future this will be picked up in searches it's even greater news. It may even work already. I did see some shifting of image order over the week, but that may have been tweaking of keyword proximity or indeed the effect of something like this. I simply attributed it to my own, and probably other contributor's keywording. Kremlin watching is not dead ;-) wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFL Posted February 6, 2015 Author Share Posted February 6, 2015 There must be something else to it. With this image (and more), I did not put double spaces either before or after the keyword france french but it shows as one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jill Morgan Posted February 6, 2015 Share Posted February 6, 2015 If you put in a comma when you keyworded, then it will keep the words between the commas together, same as if you used quotes. Jill That is great news. If this means, that in the future this will be picked up in searches it's even greater news. It may even work already. I did see some shifting of image order over the week, but that may have been tweaking of keyword proximity or indeed the effect of something like this. I simply attributed it to my own, and probably other contributor's keywording. Kremlin watching is not dead ;-) wim I discovered this when I started putting commas in keywords section in the IPTC data for use with my own photography software as it is required for it. I also find it visually easier to check that I have included all the phrases I want. When cutting and pasting into the Main keywords section in Manage Images, I almost never use up all the spaces so the extra commas aren't an issue. When checking images in Alamy search, I noticed that all phrases were together instead of broken up alphabetically. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted February 6, 2015 Share Posted February 6, 2015 There must be something else to it. With this image (and more), I did not put double spaces either before or after the keyword france french but it shows as one. Weird. Maybe Jill's commas? wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFL Posted February 6, 2015 Author Share Posted February 6, 2015 Yes, I will have to try Jill's commas. Thanks, Jill and Wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFL Posted February 19, 2015 Author Share Posted February 19, 2015 I made a query on this matter to the Member Services and I would like to share the reply. It is as follows. We have a small change in the display of keywords in the live. This is part of the recent comp changes we’ve made. According to the current logic , 4 or less keywords not separated by any specific separator (comma, quotes ) will be considered as a phrase and they’ll not be separated by commas in the live site. It’ll be separated only if you use any allowed separator (comma, quotes) or if the number of words together is greater than 4. So anyone using quotations marks when keywording, he/she will have to bear the above in mind. Sung Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 I made a query on this matter to the Member Services and I would like to share the reply. It is as follows. We have a small change in the display of keywords in the live. This is part of the recent comp changes we’ve made. According to the current logic , 4 or less keywords not separated by any specific separator (comma, quotes ) will be considered as a phrase and they’ll not be separated by commas in the live site. It’ll be separated only if you use any allowed separator (comma, quotes) or if the number of words together is greater than 4. So anyone using quotations marks when keywording, he/she will have to bear the above in mind. Sung OK. Maybe it's because I haven't had my coffee but I don't understand this. What do they mean by "the number of words together". Are they talking about the quotations marks we have used? What does "together" mean? Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TokyoM1ke Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 I'm not convinced that that can be regarded as a "small change". Edit: Not having used any commas, this is a huge amount of work, even for my truly minuscule portfolio... an auto "add commas" would be a massive improvement. Deleting a few is fine but where you are on your 50 characters, for example, you have to delete the spaces and type the commas (or equivalent action)... With 1000s it would be a nightmare! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TokyoM1ke Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 I made a query on this matter to the Member Services and I would like to share the reply. It is as follows. We have a small change in the display of keywords in the live. This is part of the recent comp changes we’ve made. According to the current logic , 4 or less keywords not separated by any specific separator (comma, quotes ) will be considered as a phrase and they’ll not be separated by commas in the live site. It’ll be separated only if you use any allowed separator (comma, quotes) or if the number of words together is greater than 4. So anyone using quotations marks when keywording, he/she will have to bear the above in mind. Sung OK. Maybe it's because I haven't had my coffee but I don't understand this. What do they mean by "the number of words together". Are they talking about the quotations marks we have used? What does "together" mean? Paulette I read it as: High speed diesel locomotive = phrase (HSDL) High speed diesel locomotive,red = still a phrase (HSDL) and the word "red" High speed diesel locomotive red = not a phrase any more Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jill Morgan Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 Remember this is only how they appear on the zoomed image page. It does not affect search. Jill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 There must be something else to it. With this image (and more), I did not put double spaces either before or after the keyword france french but it shows as one. Weird. Maybe Jill's commas? wim Goodness me... confusing or what... I wish Alamy would let us know what they're doing here. I'm sure we're all keen to keyword in a way that reduces false hits and improves the results for customers, but we NEED to know what the rules are. So far as I'm aware Alamy haven't confirmed the questions on quotation marks raised ages ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Rooney Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 "Remember this is only how they appear on the zoomed image page. It does not affect search." Jill If this "news" doesn't involved Search, why would we care about it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jill Morgan Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 "Remember this is only how they appear on the zoomed image page. It does not affect search." Jill If this "news" doesn't involved Search, why would we care about it? Right now it doesn't, but many of us figure sooner or later Alamy will incorporate the "quotes" search criteria and we want to be ready. Problem is, since they haven't done this before, it makes a lot of rework on keywords should Alamy ever decide to start search criteria based on phrases instead of just keyword order. I like it as it is easy for me to check that I have included every phrase I can think of. Trouble is, it also makes it easier for people to steal your keywords when they are nicely put together. Jill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 "Remember this is only how they appear on the zoomed image page. It does not affect search." Jill If this "news" doesn't involved Search, why would we care about it? Right now it doesn't, but many of us figure sooner or later Alamy will incorporate the "quotes" search criteria and we want to be ready. Problem is, since they haven't done this before, it makes a lot of rework on keywords should Alamy ever decide to start search criteria based on phrases instead of just keyword order. I like it as it is easy for me to check that I have included every phrase I can think of. Trouble is, it also makes it easier for people to steal your keywords when they are nicely put together. Jill I certainly hope that Alamy doesn't suddenly decide to add the quotes criteria. I stopped putting quotation marks in my keywords ages ago with the understanding that it was no longer necessary. Going back and having to add them at this point could be hazardous to one's mental and physical health. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 I have continued to use quotes and brackets. It's not that big of a deal. Well...ok...kind of is, but I do it anyway. Although I probably messed up using brackets around some phrases instead of quotes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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