Put the Year in the Tags?

[Ed Rooney]

We have another post running now about "oversaturated subjects."  I was looking through Alamy at one famous view here in New York and noticed that most of the better images do not show the up-to-date skyline. Hmm.

 

Do you think we should put the year in the tags? 

 

Edo

[ACC]

There’s a “date taken” field which gets populated from metadata. That’s searchable so buyers have got control over the age of images they see.

[Jill Morgan]

I add the year to any city or street shots that could look different later.  When hunting through AoA, I noticed a lot of searches for Toronto with the year also in the search.  Had a few zooms awhile ago for a search of Toronto 2015, but so far never turned into a sale.

 

Jill

[John Mitchell]

Yes, I put the date in the tags if I think it might make a difference, depends on the image.

[Ed Rooney]

May I assume you mean it depends on the subject, John? 

 

Thanks for the comments, people.

 

Edo  (I edited my first post a bit)

[John Mitchell]

24 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said:

May I assume you mean it depends on the subject, John? 

 

Thanks for the comments, people.

 

Edo  (I edited my first post a bit)

 

Yup, the subject of the image -- e.g. a subject that a buyer might want a very recent picture of would merit a year tag.

[Inchiquin]

I tag the year in every single image. And sometimes the month too, if it's relevant.

 

Alan

[vecchiad]

I hope the “date taken” field is enough.

[Rick Lewis]

I put the date in as a tag if I feel it may help.  I have a couple of images of famous race car drivers that were taken several years ago.  I thought it would be appropriate especially for one image of Danica Patrick the first year she started racing Indy cars.  I think it makes sense for skyline pics as well.

 

Rick

[Bryan]

Probably wise to include the year in cityscape and associated images, and the month (and season) in seasonal images. Some buyers do include these terms in their searches.

 

Having said that, I've recently had some views of 1970s photos, where the buyer specified DT, so it's not just a desire to have the latest.

[ACC]

10 hours ago, vecchiad said:

I hope the “date taken” field is enough.

 

From comments I’m wondering if the answer is a mix of date taken, tags and caption. What will be successful depends on the customer, what they’re looking for and how well they understand how to do Alamy searches. Cover all bases! 😎

[dmj]

On 25/11/2017 at 17:50, Ed Rooney said:

May I assume you mean it depends on the subject, John? 

 

Thanks for the comments, people.

 

Edo  (I edited my first post a bit)

I’ve certainly had searches of London skylines where the year was in the search term and not ‘DT’ - this pulls up any of my live news submissions only.

 

I was going to go back and add the year to any London skyline I have but had forgotten.. thanks for the reminder!!

[Matt Ashmore]

I had a load of zooms of images I took recently in Shanghai and I only got those zooms because the search keywords included "2017" and I had added '2017' as a tag on these images.

 

[hdh]

I have not been thinking about this yet and only added the year where I thought it was relevant (aka old cars manufacturing year or decade). 

Reading the thread I come to the conclusion to add the year, where it also may become of interest like skylines, which often change. 

thanks!

 

Some clients also use the "Date Taken" which in pseudonym summary shows up as "[DT]" but not enough of a reason to not add the year as a tag.  

[Patrick Cooper]

In microstock, it's compulsory to use the date within a specific caption format on editorial images. So far, I haven't seen that same caption format used in Alamy. Maybe I'll use it on my city photos in Alamy - region / state, country, followed by date etc.

[hdh]

17 hours ago, Patrick Cooper said:

In microstock, it's compulsory to use the date within a specific caption format on editorial images. So far, I haven't seen that same caption format used in Alamy. Maybe I'll use it on my city photos in Alamy - region / state, country, followed by date etc.

When you upload news you have to give the caption in that format, but not with stock images. 

[Patrick Cooper]

2 hours ago, hdh said:

When you upload news you have to give the caption in that format, but not with stock images. 

 

Ah okay. Though I guess there's nothing wrong with using that caption format in editorial stock images?

[hdh]

6 hours ago, Patrick Cooper said:

 

Ah okay. Though I guess there's nothing wrong with using that caption format in editorial stock images?

Nothing wrong, but the caption on stock images is considerably smaller (reason unknown) and giving the location in the optional fields can be much more precise.