Justin Case Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 I am new to Alamy, but I do video with several agencies, so I am aware of the importance of good keywording. I have read somewhere in forums that super tags can actually have a negative impact on search position. It is time consuming to choose supertags for every images, but I am willing to do it if it helps with discoverabilty. Also what about Category and Location, is it important to fill them? Any other tips for optimal keywording on Alamy? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reimar Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 Supertags did indeed demote images in searches for the first 4 months or so after roll out of the new alamy search engine. That eventually got fixed. From what I can tell: Categories - not now but maybe in the future. Location - probably useful now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Case Posted June 11, 2017 Author Share Posted June 11, 2017 Thank you for your reply. So you would suggest to only fill out the location and leave out Supertags and Categories for now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reimar Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 No. I'm saying supertags are now very important (as they should be). Find 10 if you can. I'm leaving categories alone for now, but may need to revisit this if things develop. Alamy suggests you start this now before it gets to be too onerous a job (like for me). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colblimp Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 I supertag and categorise my images as I upload them otherwise when my port gets very big, it'll be a time consuming nightmare. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joseph Clemson Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 Supertags seem to largely work the way one would expect nowadays, so you should use supertags to highlight the main subject of your image. Slightly contrary to Reimar, I would suggest you only supertag directly relevant keywords or phrases. Supertagging irrelevant ones will likely lead to you images being found in searches where your image is not relevant and may adversely impact your ranking in future searches (though no one seems entirely sure whether Alamy ranking is still relevant in the new search engine). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 I fill out everything there is to fill, including the line "tell us more about your image." Usually that's just a copy/paste from the caption, but sometimes I add more. If I find it cumbersome to do that, then I need to hang up my spurs. Everything we do from clicking the shutter button on requires care and time. Why skimp at the end? Sometimes (I've mentioned this before) when my tags have been around 40-42, and after choosing supertags, my image(s) have still been in the orange. I refuse to add more just to get in the discoverabity Green. Yet when I go to the next page and fill out all of the Optional fields, it often goes to green. It always surprises me. Like everyone else, I have no idea whether reaching the green does any good, but it surely does no harm. I don't tag to attain it, but I'm pleased if I happen to reach it with relevant tags. Betty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vpics Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 I think it would really be useful if Alamy incorporated the location details from the IPTC data. Most agencies do this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Ashmore Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 Have you guys seen this recent blog which touches on many of these subjects? http://www.alamy.com/blog/questions-we-get-asked-about-alamy-image-manager The blog does essentially say (in less direct words) that discoverability and categories currently don't make a difference. It also touches on the location field in IPTC data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted June 11, 2017 Share Posted June 11, 2017 4 hours ago, GS-Images said: Not everyone. Tests prove it does nothing and Alamy have said so too. Geoff. Of course, Geoff. You and I march to a different drummer. But you're going east....I'm going west! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Case Posted June 13, 2017 Author Share Posted June 13, 2017 Wow, loads of interesting replies. Many thanks, I like this forum :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Avpics Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 On 6/11/2017 at 6:57 PM, Betty LaRue said: Everything we do from clicking the shutter button on requires care and time. Why skimp at the end? Betty I often think that with some of the issues raised in the forum. Perhaps that and 'if it was easy everyone would be doing it' should be pinned to the front page! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 On 6/11/2017 at 1:01 PM, GS-Images said: Not everyone. Tests prove it does nothing and Alamy have said so too. Geoff. On that note, Geoff, this is how I think. I know you'll correct me if I'm wrong. Do not spam to get to the green. Use only relevant tags. But.....if you manage to get to the green, that means you have more relevant tags than when you were in the orange. More relevant tags might mean that one of those added relevant tags might be one that is searched. So getting in the green just might mean I have a better chance at my image being brought up in a search. The green is nothing more than an indicator that I have tagged well as long as the tags are relevant. i have many images that even when tagged well, I've only used 20 + tags. I leave them be, because the only way they could reach green is by spamming, which would hurt my CTR. Betty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted June 14, 2017 Share Posted June 14, 2017 I think I've said somewhere that I greened one by accident the other day via copy and paste. That bring this year's total to 7. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted June 14, 2017 Share Posted June 14, 2017 10 hours ago, GS-Images said: just about every newbie (and many not-so-newbies) see it as improving their chances if they get "into the green". So they try to achieve this, which is understandable for newbies as they aren't aware of our discussions about it. It clearly encourages spamming though. Geoff. Agree. The only blessing is after awhile, the spamming will hurt their rank ( if there is such a thing anymore). The bad thing is after they sink into the nether, they'll be a new raft of spammers joining to push our well-tagged images down. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
York Photographer Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 Just keyworded a few (not bothered up loading since AIM came in) what a God awful, fiddly and clumsy way of doing it. It would seem from this and other threads that supertags don't count for anything? Just as well as adding those is a complete fiddle, maybe it's just this end, using chrome, but the cursor changes to a huge cross when you mouse over a word, yet this huge clumsy cross shaped cursor only turns the super tag on when it's over the star and not the word. Took longer to do the half dozen pictures in AIM than it would have done by cutting and pasting words in the old system. adding single words and stemmed phrases takes way longer than just adding single words Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 The huge cross is so you can combine tags to make phrases. My silly mind wants to start with the first word of the phrase but then you get them backwards. You have to drag the second word on to the first one. One thing you can do is copy from the preview page of an old image. The words will be in alphabetical order, unfortunately, and you'll probably need to make phrases. I'm thinking I have to try keywording in TextEdit. So crazy. The people who keyword in Bridge are apparently doing fine. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 If the supertag were to be activated on mouseover of the whole word, you wouldn't be able to delete or drag a tag. You get used to it. I've only uploaded a few hundred under it and I have, including the intermediate copy/paste/macro step to get rid of carriage returns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 1 hour ago, spacecadet said: If the supertag were to be activated on mouseover of the whole word, you wouldn't be able to delete or drag a tag. You get used to it. I've only uploaded a few hundred under it and I have, including the intermediate copy/paste/macro step to get rid of carriage returns. I do not a see a problem with leaving in carriage returns. It has been brought up by Alamy as a suggestion of what caused tags to break unexpectedly, I think. However this problem has been fixed afaik. CR had not been the cause of the breaking of tags anyway. For now: a tag should be one line ending with a comma or a semicolon. Some other characters may work, because some agencies use them. Some are not printable and take up only one space (so not character+space), which seems to be the point. Initially some problems could be countered by inserting a space before the comma. Not sure this is still needed / working now we have longer tags and unexpected breaking has been fixed. It's a good thing to check all legacy images though to see if any characters have been causing huge tags or the breaking up of single keywords like with a string of keywords using apostrophes or dashes. I have had quite a few of both. wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 Yes, with legacy images I've even seen this.... dog, dog, s playing, with my plural s going into the next tag. Never could figure out what caused that. The problem with trying to fix it, is some of those images have over 50 tags, so I can't just delete "dog, s playing", and add back in "dogs, playing" without going through the whole bit of deleting enough tags to get down to 48 so I can put the right ones in. A pain, for sure. Betty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 3 hours ago, wiskerke said: I do not a see a problem with leaving in carriage returns. It has been brought up by Alamy as a suggestion of what caused tags to break unexpectedly, I think. However this problem has been fixed afaik. CR had not been the cause of the breaking of tags anyway. For now: a tag should be one line ending with a comma or a semicolon. Some other characters may work, because some agencies use them. Some are not printable and take up only one space (so not character+space), which seems to be the point. Initially some problems could be countered by inserting a space before the comma. Not sure this is still needed / working now we have longer tags and unexpected breaking has been fixed. It's a good thing to check all legacy images though to see if any characters have been causing huge tags or the breaking up of single keywords like with a string of keywords using apostrophes or dashes. I have had quite a few of both. wim Which browser are you using? For me in FF52 a direct copy/paste from other tags still only fills one long tag, spaces between words, and ignores the rest.. Oddly though just pasting into Word, copying again and pasting back without adding commas fixes it. You get a bullet point character but they are ignored in search. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 I've now tagged about 300 images using the new AIM. Which should be long enough to get used to it. But, my conclusion is, I hate it, and much prefer the old system. Maybe the new system will be improved but at the moment several key things just don't work. Cut and paste - doesn't work (unless I go via another document and manually add in the commas) Selecting multiple images and then adding and removing tags seems to work OK, until I have a mixture of tags and supertags that differ between selected images. Then it gets awful confusing. Can't edit a tag, it has to be deleted and retyped Location box sometimes works (drives the map) sometimes doesn't. No idea why. I much preferred the tabbed layout and consistent text entry boxes of the old MI. The new system does look better, and works without flash. But, in my opinion, the old system was easier and more efficient to use. I guess I should start keywording before uploading, but I'd still have to use the new MI or all the other entry fields. YUK! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 10 minutes ago, spacecadet said: Which browser are you using? For me in FF52 a direct copy/paste from other tags still only fills one long tag, spaces between words, and ignores the rest.. Oddly though just pasting into Word, copying again and pasting back without adding commas fixes it. You get a bullet point character but they are ignored in search. I'm also mainly on FF, but I know there's no way of copy pasting directly. Always use an intermediate document. If it works with Word, I would say there's your solution there. However if you get a bullet list, do you still have to remove CR? In any case here the bullet points seem to work as a tag delimiter. Also probably because some agencies may use it. wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 Apparently with the intermediate copy/paste the CRs can stay in now. I shall probably still run the macro though out of habit; ctrl-alt-A is quite quick. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe Posted June 20, 2017 Share Posted June 20, 2017 Is it possible to delete multiple/all tags from an image, or do they have to be deleted one by one? Joe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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