Ugh, Keywords!

After a week of waiting (and an email) I was finally rejected from Alamy I thought I might be, however I had made another account and made sure my pictures were sharp. That one was approved in 24 hours.

I also found a Alamy plug in for Lightroom that lets you add the main and comprehensive  keywords in the right places and set all the flags before you upload the pictures. This is quite handy since having to go into the Alamy site and set all this information manually is slow and tedious. Better to do it in one go and then the pictures should be ready to be sold as soon as they’re approved. The demo only allows 3 pictures to be uploaded at once (and stupidly the export default puts the quality at 60%….. grrrrr, I uploaded a crappy picture before I noticed) but it might be worth the $40 price if it lets you upload 100 pictures a time while you go to sleep. Or maybe I’ll take a look at the Lightroom SDK and figure out how to do it for free

Yesterday I took a good look at this whole business of keywords. Its something of which I had a vague awareness of but never really explored it thoroughly. When my photos are geoencoded by my GPS program it throws the country, state and city into the keywords list too (as well as the other fields) but I haven’t really been keywording my pictures at all. I add a few tags so I know which are which, i.e. LPI pictures or portfolio, but my whole keyword list is a bit of a mess.
First thing I discovered was that you can add keywords and have them only showing in Lightroom. You do this by making them Categories.

If the ‘Include on Export’ isn’t ticked it’s now a category and won’t show when you make your jpgs. Neat huh?

Or so I thought until I started making test files….

If ‘Write Keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy’ is ticked (and it was) then all the keywords are exported. This is handy if you want to make sure all the data is sent with the file, but should be unticked if you don’t want your categories to be exported.

So what else can we do?

All my pictures contain location information already but if they didn’t  do I really want to type in ‘South America, Chile, Arica’ for every file? Even clicking the tags takes time.

Instead the categories are organized into a hierarchy

[Location]

[Countries]

South America

Chile

Región de Arica y Parinacota

Arica

{Small Town}

So when I add ‘Arica’ as a keyword it also adds, ‘South America, Chile, Región de Arica y Parinacota (the state) AND Small Town’ to the keyword list when I export the picture.

This give me a powerful way of quickly adding attributes to pictures. Another example:

[Emotions]

[Positive Emotions]

Happy

Smile

{Smiling}

{Teeth}

{Eyes}

{Face}

So if I add ‘Smile’ as a keyword we can assume that the persons face, teeth and eyes are visible and they are automatically included.

So, it’s easy to add keywords and tag everything right? Uh, not really. Building a decent keyword list is not something I’m really looking forward to. I found a few free lists on the net but to even scratch the surface of what I need to do would take weeks, maybe months. There are a couple of commercial lists of 11,000 and 28,000 words, but they’re $70 and $109 each!! I’m not exactly being swamped with offers to keyword my photos though, the only place that gave me a proper quote would charge 57c a photo. For the 1,200 I have ready that’s $684! If they can do one a minute they’re earning $34/hour. I’d rather work for that much and of course you have the problem of accuracy with locations and the like. Perhaps a better solution is to buy and build my own keyword list and then pass that over to someone else to do the work when I’m happy with it… assuming I ever make any money from this endeavour.

October 28, 2011 | Categories: Chile 2011, Photography, South America 2011 | Tags: alamy, demo, email, flags, gps program, grrrrr, hierarchy, keyword list, lightroom, LPI, photos, sdk, sleep, test files, vague awareness | Leave A Comment »