The Mundane

There are several things taking my time up lately and most of them are rather mundane. I’m spending a lot of time keywording photographs. For some of you, this is not very important, all you need to do is keyword an image so you can find it quickly in your library. However, for many of us, this task, however painful and boring is critical. It ensures that others who are looking for a photograph can find what they are looking for. So someone who’s looking for a story, a concept or even a thought that needs to be illustrated with an image, will be able to type  into a search engine a word that hopefully illustrates that point and presto, an image fitting their need pops up!

Here is how it might work. Lets say an in-flight magazine for an airlines like Egypt Air or Gulf Air is writing an article about an Egyptian destination, and they’re looking for photographs to illustrate it, they may have specific things in mind. Lets put ourselves in the shoes of an editor for a minute. We need a few photographs that  illustrates traditional Egyptian culture. So we go to a stock house like PhotoShelter and type in some keywords that we think might link us to some images that will illustrate our article. In this case, we type in Egypt and galabeya (the long traditional Egyptian cloak worn by the men). What do we get? Well, several picture from Marco Ryan and hopefully the photo up above and a few more.  The point is, you need to second-guess what terms people will be using to search. Actually, for the photo above the keywords are;

carpet, Egypt, galabeya, headdress, headgear, Islam, Male, Man, Muslim, Nile, Nubian, oriental rug, persian rug, robe, rug, sand, sunset, traditional, village, white

Good keywording helps sell your images.  The trick to all this is consistency and quite frankly tenacity.  Consistency is really another  term for a controlled vocabulary. By maintaining a controlled vocabulary it makes searching easier.  An example given by the folks over at controlledvocabulary.com (yes there really is a website by that name) is the Yellow Pages. Most everyone has used Yellow Pages in a phone book. When you look up “Car Dealers” you fine a notation to “see Automobile Dealers.” In a simple way this is what were talking about. Now, I’m not going to go into details on how controlled vocabulary works for two reasons:  first, I don’t fully understand it myself, and second, the people at controlledvocabulary.com already understand it and have a whole website explaining it.  By tenacity I mean, tenacity–sticking to it. It’s boring and tedious work to keyword photographs. But if you want to sell your images you need to have good keywording. Quite frankly, almost any keywords are better than no keywords.

I see keywording a little bit like backing up your hard drive. It’s a mundane task that is essential. There is some great software out there that makes backing up the hard drive easy and painless. I wish there was some software that would do the same with keywording a photograph. But, I think we are a long way from a photo being read by a computer and having the objects in it being identified and listed as keywords. Even if it could (and that would be a great start), there are still concepts within the photo that could never be read by computer like; loneliness, anger, joy etc… Maybe someday.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Blog, how to, Opinion, Photography and tagged with controlledvocabulary.com, Egypt Air, Gulf Air, keywording, Keywords, Marco Ryan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.