Another small line has been passed ...

[Gennadii Rybalov]

One year and six months of hard work and I went through another small frontier.
Only from its place it is not entirely clear how qualitatively my efforts have changed, especially with the English language.
Any comments will be valuable!

[John Walker]

Hi Gennadii,

 

Congratulations,

You've just beaten me to the 5000 mark.  I should be at 5000 later this year.  One big difference is that you have achieved it in 1.5 years and I have taken 5 years plus.

 

John

[Betty LaRue]

Congratulations on the 5000 mark! 

And I think you are learning the language, I can understand your posts so much better than when you started.

whether that translates to tags, I didn't look.

[Cryptoprocta]

1 hour ago, Gennadii Rybalov said:

One year and six months of hard work and I went through another small frontier.
Only from its place it is not entirely clear how qualitatively my efforts have changed, especially with the English language.
Any comments will be valuable!

As I said the last time, I have huge sympathy with anyone who has to keyword in other than their native language.

I picked #JHNM40 to look at, as birds are one of my interests.

https://tinyurl.com/y8e82e2f

 

First of all, you have a lot of keywords which are totally irrelevant to the photo:

beach, coast, lake, marine, ocean, river, rock, rocks, sea, shore, water,

 

a couple which are, 'debatable':

ecology, ornithology,

 

and some which might not be totally relevant, e.g. beak, wing etc. These are shown in your photo, so not totally wrong, but possibly if a buyer searches on 'wing' or 'beak' they want a photo of these in detail, as all birds have beaks and wings etc. That's up for discussion, I'm maybe making wrong assumptions about buyer activity.

 

Now: identification.

In your title, you say it's a Larus canus, which is a Common Gull. I assume Mew in your keywords refers to the American name for this species (Mew Gull).

Anyway, it's definitely NOT  Larus canus. Your bird has a red spot on the beak, which Larus canus doesn't.

In your keywords, you also have Larus ridibundus. That is a Black-headed Gull, which your photograph also isn't (B-H Gulls have a dark red beak).

 

Your bird is probably a Lesser Black-backed Gull, Larus fuscus. I'm assuming you took it near where you live, so unlikely to be Yellow-legged Gull. It's important to get identification correct. You don't want a buyer being embarrassed by using a wrongly-labelled image.

If they are able to see for themselves that a species has been identified wrongly, they are just going to be annoyed, and have a poor view of Alamy, which hurts us all.

 

BTW, you shouldn't need to put a hyphen to keep words as a keyword phrase. I'm finding that putting e.g. just wild bird, keeps the phrase from splitting. If it's really important that they stay together, I put e.g. "wild bird", but I'm not sure that's strictly necessary.

 

Good luck.

 

 

[NYCat]

I see that you are photographing real people now, rather than models. That is a big improvement.

 

Paulette

[Gennadii Rybalov]

Betty, John, thank you for the evaluation!
I'm glad that I have shifts for the better!

[Gennadii Rybalov]

5 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said:

As I said the last time, I have huge sympathy with anyone who has to keyword in other than their native language.

I picked #JHNM40 to look at, as birds are one of my interests.

https://tinyurl.com/y8e82e2f

 

First of all, you have a lot of keywords which are totally irrelevant to the photo:

beach, coast, lake, marine, ocean, river, rock, rocks, sea, shore, water,

 

a couple which are, 'debatable':

ecology, ornithology,

 

and some which might not be totally relevant, e.g. beak, wing etc. These are shown in your photo, so not totally wrong, but possibly if a buyer searches on 'wing' or 'beak' they want a photo of these in detail, as all birds have beaks and wings etc. That's up for discussion, I'm maybe making wrong assumptions about buyer activity.

 

Now: identification.

In your title, you say it's a Larus canus, which is a Common Gull. I assume Mew in your keywords refers to the American name for this species (Mew Gull).

Anyway, it's definitely NOT  Larus canus. Your bird has a red spot on the beak, which Larus canus doesn't.

In your keywords, you also have Larus ridibundus. That is a Black-headed Gull, which your photograph also isn't (B-H Gulls have a dark red beak).

 

Your bird is probably a Lesser Black-backed Gull, Larus fuscus. I'm assuming you took it near where you live, so unlikely to be Yellow-legged Gull. It's important to get identification correct. You don't want a buyer being embarrassed by using a wrongly-labelled image.

If they are able to see for themselves that a species has been identified wrongly, they are just going to be annoyed, and have a poor view of Alamy, which hurts us all.

 

BTW, you shouldn't need to put a hyphen to keep words as a keyword phrase. I'm finding that putting e.g. just wild bird, keeps the phrase from splitting. If it's really important that they stay together, I put e.g. "wild bird", but I'm not sure that's strictly necessary.

 

Good luck.

 

 

Honestly, Wikipedia gave me the name of a seagull.
I am curious for your amendment, I will correct it.
I really appreciate the time you spent on me !!!

[Gennadii Rybalov]

11 minutes ago, NYCat said:

I see that you are photographing real people now, rather than models. That is a big improvement.

 

Paulette

I try to use the summer season, because in winter it's difficult for me.
Thank you!!!

[Cryptoprocta]

5 minutes ago, Gennadii Rybalov said:

Honestly, Wikipedia gave me the name of a seagull.
I am curious for your amendment, I will correct it.
I really appreciate the time you spent on me !!!

Another thing: could you consider using keywords in your own language?

 

Mind you, with the mess the system makes of apostrophes and some accents etc, it might not work out for you.

But if it works, you'd have an advantage over the rest of us who don't know your language and can't keyword in it. You might sell more to local buyers.

[Gennadii Rybalov]

13 minutes ago, Cryptoprocta said:

Another thing: could you consider using keywords in your own language?

 

Mind you, with the mess the system makes of apostrophes and some accents etc, it might not work out for you.

But if it works, you'd have an advantage over the rest of us who don't know your language and can't keyword in it. You might sell more to local buyers.

I do not think that buyers of my country need more.
Everywhere you have to fill out everything in English.

[Doc]

Congratulations Gennadii - I shall have to watch my back with your number of images increasing so quickly!

 

Kind regards

 

Kumar (the Doc one)

[Gennadii Rybalov]

5 hours ago, Doc said:

Congratulations Gennadii - I shall have to watch my back with your number of images increasing so quickly!

 

Kind regards

 

Kumar (the Doc one)

Hardly!
Unfortunately I'm not a competitor, although I would really like ...
Thank you!

[AlessandraRC]

Man we started almost at the same time you leave me in the dust! 

[Cryptoprocta]

On 25/07/2017 at 20:07, Gennadii Rybalov said:

Honestly, Wikipedia gave me the name of a seagull.
I am curious for your amendment, I will correct it.
I really appreciate the time you spent on me !!!

 

Oh dear, you took out a lot of wrong keywords, but either you added more, or I didn't see them the first time.

Did you make the changes in Alamy Image Manager? If so Lesser Black-backed Gull, and Larus fuscus, should stick the keyword phrases together and not separate them.

 

Current totally irrelevant words:

west, crying, fishing, hunting, waterside, sharp, seaside, immature, ocean, nautical, screaming, screeching, isle, fly,

 

I personally wouldn't put feather, beak, eye, sea, maritime,

 

Motto: if it's not in the image, it shouldn't be in your keywords, except for concepts (e.g. you have 'freedom' which is arguably fine for this image).

Do you think somone searching for 'sharp' or 'ocean' or 'west' (etc).would want to see this image?

There's no value in uploading thousands of images if they're incorrectly keyworded. Keywording and proper research is what takes the time and skill. More so if doing it in a foreign language.

[Cryptoprocta]

PLEASE, for your own sake, Alamy's sake, and the sake of all of us, SLOW DOWN with your uploading and be a lot more careful with your keywording

I looked at JGMPX7 a very simple photo of an unspecified rose.

 

In your keywords, but nowhere in your image are these totally irrelevant keywords:

anniversary
arrangement
art

blossom
bud
bunch
card
celebration
concept
decoration
design
gentle
gift
greeting
holiday
love
marriage
red
romance
romantic
rosy
spring
stem
valentine
wedding
white

 

and I wouldn't put:

background (almost all images have some sort of background), garden (can't see any mnore of the garden), macro (it's close-up, it's definitely not macro), petal I(someone searching petal wants one petal, almost certainly, if they want a flower, they'll search on flower), top (arguable, it's the top of the rose, but ...)

 

What I'm struggling to understand is why, if you don't understand English well, you keep finding totally irrelevant words (lots more irrelevant than relevant). Where are you getting them? I can't imagine you're going into a language dictionary and looking up your version of 'white' when there's no white in the image. Etc etc etc as above.

 

[Gennadii Rybalov]

5 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said:

 

Oh dear, you took out a lot of wrong keywords, but either you added more, or I didn't see them the first time.

Did you make the changes in Alamy Image Manager? If so Lesser Black-backed Gull, and Larus fuscus, should stick the keyword phrases together and not separate them.

 

Current totally irrelevant words:

west, crying, fishing, hunting, waterside, sharp, seaside, immature, ocean, nautical, screaming, screeching, isle, fly,

 

I personally wouldn't put feather, beak, eye, sea, maritime,

 

Motto: if it's not in the image, it shouldn't be in your keywords, except for concepts (e.g. you have 'freedom' which is arguably fine for this image).

Do you think somone searching for 'sharp' or 'ocean' or 'west' (etc).would want to see this image?

There's no value in uploading thousands of images if they're incorrectly keyworded. Keywording and proper research is what takes the time and skill. More so if doing it in a foreign language.

I understand you. Recently, I often use to search for keywords  http://www.microstockgroup.com/tools/keyword.php It seems that I carefully review the proposed ones, but apparently this is not the resource that I need.
I will try to look different, it seems that I'm at a dead end.
I do not know what to do, I have to peremrttret all my images and edit it in a new way. Only I do not understand how to do it better.
Thank you for your time and constructive description of my mistakes.
  Can someone advise the resource more accurately offering keywords!

[Cryptoprocta]

7 hours ago, Gennadii Rybalov said:

I understand you. Recently, I often use to search for keywords  http://www.microstockgroup.com/tools/keyword.php It seems that I carefully review the proposed ones, but apparently this is not the resource that I need.
I will try to look different, it seems that I'm at a dead end.
I do not know what to do, I have to peremrttret all my images and edit it in a new way. Only I do not understand how to do it better.
Thank you for your time and constructive description of my mistakes.
  Can someone advise the resource more accurately offering keywords!

You're not going to like this, but these so-called keywording resources are the curse of the business, and are the cause of so much dreadful keywording.

I was pretty sure you were using this resource, but didn't want to say so.

What they all do is look for other files on certain agencies that might be similar to yours and show you the keywords that their authors used. So if they have ten files matching yours, and each one of these has two bad keywords (or keywords which match their files, but not yours), you immediately have 20 wrong keywords.

 

There is NO point in having 5000 pics in the collection that are badly keyworded. Heaven knows, there are enough badly keyworded files on Alamy (and all the others) already.

 

In your position, I would look at my image and pick the most important 5 - 10 keywords, look up a dictionary, crosscheck the words (using a dictionary only is a sure way of getting it wrong a lot of the time) and go with only them. When in a non-English speaking country, I still keyword in English, but look up the most important words in the language of the country - that may only be the main subject and location if spelled differently and people/men/women/children  (if relevant).

 

Anyway, in English, I'd keyword your gull photo: Lesser Black-backed Gull, Larus fuscus, Gull, bird, (sadly, I'd also tag Seagull, hoping no-one I know would happen to see that!), flying, in flight, nature, wildlife, wild bird, freedom, blue sky.

 

If I had your rose photo, I'd really wish I knew which cultivar it was, there are 139,54 pink roses on Alamy. However, don't try to work it out, you'll never be able to identify your cultivar from that photo. Not knowing that, and seeing all the other photos here, I probably wouldn't upload that pic, but if I were to, I'd stick with, Rose, flower, flora, pink, pink rose, possibly beautiful and that would be it.

 

Far better to have five relevant keywords than 25 irrelevant ones.

 

A relevant dictionary for you might be if they have a DK Visual Dictionary for your language into English. It's not much use as a general translation dictionary, but it's arranged into topics, for example there are a few pages of sport, and you have photos and everything is labelled.

Actually, just looking at my French/English visual dictionary, it would be possible, but a bit more difficult, to use it even if it doesn't exist in your language. The labels are in both French and English, so although it would be more difficult for you to find the relevant section, once there, everything is labelled.

Sincere apologies if your native language isn't Russian, but to let you see what it looks like, here is the Russian/English version, so you can look at the photos of the inside pages:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russian-English-Bilingual-Dictionary-Dictionaries/dp/0241244455

(I have no connection with DK or amazon other than as a customer)

[Gennadii Rybalov]

6 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said:

You're not going to like this, but these so-called keywording resources are the curse of the business, and are the cause of so much dreadful keywording.

I was pretty sure you were using this resource, but didn't want to say so.

What they all do is look for other files on certain agencies that might be similar to yours and show you the keywords that their authors used. So if they have ten files matching yours, and each one of these has two bad keywords (or keywords which match their files, but not yours), you immediately have 20 wrong keywords.

 

There is NO point in having 5000 pics in the collection that are badly keyworded. Heaven knows, there are enough badly keyworded files on Alamy (and all the others) already.

 

In your position, I would look at my image and pick the most important 5 - 10 keywords, look up a dictionary, crosscheck the words (using a dictionary only is a sure way of getting it wrong a lot of the time) and go with only them. When in a non-English speaking country, I still keyword in English, but look up the most important words in the language of the country - that may only be the main subject and location if spelled differently and people/men/women/children  (if relevant).

 

Anyway, in English, I'd keyword your gull photo: Lesser Black-backed Gull, Larus fuscus, Gull, bird, (sadly, I'd also tag Seagull, hoping no-one I know would happen to see that!), flying, in flight, nature, wildlife, wild bird, freedom, blue sky.

 

If I had your rose photo, I'd really wish I knew which cultivar it was, there are 139,54 pink roses on Alamy. However, don't try to work it out, you'll never be able to identify your cultivar from that photo. Not knowing that, and seeing all the other photos here, I probably wouldn't upload that pic, but if I were to, I'd stick with, Rose, flower, flora, pink, pink rose, possibly beautiful and that would be it.

 

Far better to have five relevant keywords than 25 irrelevant ones.

 

A relevant dictionary for you might be if they have a DK Visual Dictionary for your language into English. It's not much use as a general translation dictionary, but it's arranged into topics, for example there are a few pages of sport, and you have photos and everything is labelled.

Actually, just looking at my French/English visual dictionary, it would be possible, but a bit more difficult, to use it even if it doesn't exist in your language. The labels are in both French and English, so although it would be more difficult for you to find the relevant section, once there, everything is labelled.

Sincere apologies if your native language isn't Russian, but to let you see what it looks like, here is the Russian/English version, so you can look at the photos of the inside pages:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russian-English-Bilingual-Dictionary-Dictionaries/dp/0241244455

(I have no connection with DK or amazon other than as a customer)

All right!
But, unfortunately, we have to be content with this. For me, there have already been great moves in English, although in my student years I studied German now, when it's over 50, it's not quite easy to give a new one, but I think I'm on the right track and I can not fail.
Thank you for such an attentive approach!

[KODAKovic]

Gennadii are you also a member of SS? 

I was wondering that 'cause you often uploaded micro-kind pictures. In that case, you could use "keyword suggestion" tool there which could help.

i go through of all the keywords this tool offers me and choose the appropriate ones.

I do that just for some keywords but i force my self to keyword manually more and more often.

Hope this helps

[Gennadii Rybalov]

5 hours ago, KODAKovic said:

Gennadii are you also a member of SS? 

I was wondering that 'cause you often uploaded micro-kind pictures. In that case, you could use "keyword suggestion" tool there which could help.

i go through of all the keywords this tool offers me and choose the appropriate ones.

I do that just for some keywords but i force my self to keyword manually more and more often.

Hope this helps

Thank you! I'm just using the resource, where I suggest, if I'm not mistaken, versions of similar images with SS.
But, as already mentioned above, not exactly what you need.

[Cryptoprocta]

5 hours ago, KODAKovic said:

Gennadii are you also a member of SS? 

I was wondering that 'cause you often uploaded micro-kind pictures. In that case, you could use "keyword suggestion" tool there which could help.

i go through of all the keywords this tool offers me and choose the appropriate ones.

I do that just for some keywords but i force my self to keyword manually more and more often.

Hope this helps

Please ... NO!

I know you didn't ask for a keyword crit, but since you were recommending a keyword tool, I'm going to show how it doesn't work by using one of your pics.

I looked at #J0NJTP because it's a simple image. It's a camel with a blanket standing in the desert with dunes in the background.

Among your totally irrelevant tags are:

cross, east, eastern, men, middle, muslin, people, tourist, sight.

There are others I wouldn't use, but the above are indisputable.

 

BTW, Gennadii, I'm older than you and am revisiting the French I haven't studied at for 45 years. I understand better than you think.

[KODAKovic]

13 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said:

Please ... NO!

I know you didn't ask for a keyword crit, but since you were recommending a keyword tool, I'm going to show how it doesn't work by using one of your pics.

I looked at #J0NJTP because it's a simple image. It's a camel with a blanket standing in the desert with dunes in the background.

Among your totally irrelevant tags are:

cross, east, eastern, men, middle, muslin, people, tourist, sight.

There are others I wouldn't use, but the above are indisputable.

 

BTW, Gennadii, I'm older than you and am revisiting the French I haven't studied at for 45 years. I understand better than you think.

 

Well, i just started to use this tool since i've often the same issue of the OP.

As already said i don't trust this tool automatically, i'm just using it 'cause i often forget related keywords to what is in the picture (like as you mentioned the camel pic, "eastern" for a camel in desert which is located in the eastern side of the world)

[Gennadii Rybalov]

Unfortunately, there are no other options to facilitate the writing of keywords.
Of all there is a mystery, I understand, to remove competitors.

At least hint !!!

[Gennadii Rybalov]

50 minutes ago, arterra said:

 

Yes there is:

1. Use a Word or Excel file with strings of tags
2. strings of words that are applicable for main subjects (take your time to choose RELEVANT words in CORRECT English)
3. look at the picture >> choose the appropriate string >> add some more tags specific to that particular image (name, location, colour, etc...)

Examples:

songbirds: bird, animal, nature, wildlife, passerine, songbird, ................... applicable for ALL songbirds

gulls: bird, animal, nature, wildlife, gull, seagull, seabird, coast, ................. applicable for ALL gulls

church: building, church, architecture, religion, religious, Catholic, .............. applicable for ALL churches

 

Add more additional tags than usually needed at the back, because it works quicker to delete part of a string than adding words (E.g. "flight, flying" for birds. If the bird's not flying, simply delete that last part of the string)

 

• works fast and efficient
• you avoid misspellings
• avoid irrelevant tags
• uniform workflow

 

Takes some time at the beginning, but is worth every minute. And, of course, over time, you'll perfect those strings by adding more universal tags for that particular main subject.

 

Cheers,

Philippe

Philippe, thank you!
I will try to do something like this, maybe it will be good for me and for other such stupid people.

[Gennadii Rybalov]

7 minutes ago, arterra said:

 

You're not stupid, you're courageous. Not many here would have the guts to submit to a Russian agency ........ in Russian 

Respect for that

 

Cheers,

Philippe 

Maybe it's like you say. But unfortunately brings the wrong result, which you rely on, giving so much of your labor and time, all the blame to understandable things, which in principle should not affect sales, but they can not be influenced, let it go by itself .....