Finding stuff....

Nikon D2x 17-35mm f2.8 lens, post processed using Nik Color Efex Pro 3.00

Much of our time is spent making sure we can find stuff. Using a totally digital work flow should make this task a lot easier and it does. Every image has key words added during the importation stage and those key words then stay with the image for the rest of its life on our system. Even when shooting film it was rare indeed for an image to go missing, and then it was usually because someone had put the negative into the wrong file bag. That believe me was not a good thing, as the only solution was to then manually search all file bags until you found the one shot you were looking for. Most of of team at some stage filed a negative into the wrong bag, few made the same mistake again as the rule was you loose it you find it.

Searching for stock images is a problem as we need to have enough key words applied to an image to allow it to be found with relative ease but not so many as to have the image keep on appearing in search results inappropriately. The image above for example can be found by typing Murray River into the simple search panel on our Excitations website but the reality is that anyone who was searching for an image of the Murray River, would be unlikely to be looking for an image like the one above. However the shot was created on the Murray and the keywords Murray River should be applied to the image. Other images to appear in the search for Murray River include news portraits of speakers at a water crisis meeting held last year. While not relevant to a search looking for images of the river, those images needed a reference to the River Murray as that was the main focus of the discussions on that evening.

Other issues the outback photographer has with meta data and that is essentially what keywords are, along with image titles and image descriptions, is the way various image library search engines deal with the data. For example one of the libraries that we submit work to virtually ignores titles and descriptions, relying instead almost entirely on keywords. Yet another places heavy reliance on descriptions but vary little on keywords. One library provides much better results if you have a very detailed description attached, but another with the same image provides more search reliability if the description is only a few words long. For me the problem is having to re write descriptions and keywords many times over for the one image, or risk that image being lost forever in the libraries system. Any image that fails to get onto the first two or three pages of a search frankly is dead in the water.

The final issue I have with image searches is the current habit of photographers to throw a dictionary at ever image. Their rational seems to be that the more people who see an image the more likely someone is to license that image. That is simple miss guided, if I'm searching for an image of a glass of Shiraz, then I certainly don't want pictures of citrus trees, bowls of fresh fruit and motorcars in a carpark heading up the search result. When this happens I get grumpy as I would expect most genuine buyers would.