Keywording: redundant and killing me

[Imagery by Charly]

To try out uploads with the plugin for the first time, I quality checked 3 images. After assuring they were good, I filled in all the Alamy related fields: ess/main keywords, caption, photography, releases, etc. and then uploaded them via the plugin. I figure since the other site I'm on at the moment doesn't have RM, any images I place as RF on both, it will be easier to just copy what I've done in Alamy to those on the other site. Today they were accepted to my surprise with it being Saturday, so I went to the images in the Not Ready and nothing but the Comprehensive keywords was filled in. 

 

So am I to presume that uploads doesn't use all the fields filled in? That I need to do a upload, then after accepted do a Set? A bit wasteful, but not as much time as redoing all the keywords I reckon.

[sdes]

........

 

If you have specific questions just ask, or send an email to the author through the plugin site trouble ticket system, he has been very prompt responding to my questions., I paid and downloaded the plugin for Mac OSX on 15th August. 

Interesting, "very Prompt" has not been my experience - 18 days and counting in my case to hear back from lightroom-plugins.com.

 

In the install guide it said"Download the ZIP and extract it to your desktop. You should see a folder called “AlamyLoader”, containing the plug-in and folders called “Smart Collections LR2” and “Smart Collections LR3”.

 

There was nothing called "Smart Collections LR3", so I queried this with the Author's ticket system, you get an immediate response to say it is on their system etc, log in to see the reply, but now two days into September and still no response.

 

Sadly it all has a slight feel of abandonment - Lightroom is on 5.5 now, perhaps there was no need for any updating after LR3,

 

It does seem like a clever system, and I think I sort of answered my own questions, despite there being no "Smart Collections LR3" as outlined in the instructions, they do seem to have loaded.

 

My experience so far is that there is confusion, perhaps just mine, around how to handle the "Essential" vs "Main" keywords using the plugin, the other tool I've tried is "keyword perfect" which does separate those fields automatically, and I was hoping I could use the two in combination - perhaps someone has, and could describe their workflow, but it is not a LR plugin and so works on the jpeg file outside of LR, I was hoping I could then use the LR Alamy plugin to do the 'fine tuning' and manage uploads, but I couldn't seem to get it to see the keywords I've added in KeyworPerfect.

 

So, it would seem that software doesn't really warrant the 'perfect' keyword, and the LR plugin could benefit with some improvements to UI too.

 

Does anyone use anything else as a plugin? Or is it really a choice of 1 for Alamy?

 

Thanks.

 

Stephen