Development of your own keywording strategy

 

Anyone who wants to market their pictures well as a photographer has to take care of the keywording. Photos cannot be marketed without a description of the image and search terms. For many photographers this is not an enjoyable task, but a necessary evil. You didn’t become a photographer for nothing, and not a taxonomy specialist.

But a virtue can be made out of necessity. Those who solve keywording efficiently are better off than those who solve it poorly or not at all. Efficiency means: the best result in the shortest possible time. Efficiency is favored by a simple strategy. If the software then supports this strategy, keywording can become a fruitful routine work.

 

In 3 steps to efficient keywording

  1. Create a description of the image
  2. Use the image description as a starting point for keywording
  3. Complete the most important standard terms

The image description is highly relevant for recording on Google and other search engines. A good description of the picture supports and simplifies the keywording. In KIM Keywording, our in-house keywording software, the image description can be evaluated with the wizard function. All words for which there are hits in the keyword database are displayed for selection – including the complete keyword structures. In KIM Keywording, creating an image description speeds up the keywording process. If anything is missing, please add the words. At the end you look for additional standard terms. In KIM Keywording, this is done with the QuickLists.

 

What are standard terms?

Standard terms are those that are used repeatedly for your images. Of course, there are big differences when you work as an outdoor photographer or as a museum photographer. Whatever is relevant to you should be readily available when you tag your images. Standard terms should also and especially be helpful for those who are looking for their pictures. There should also be auxiliary words to help narrow down the search results better. So these would be criteria for inclusion or exclusion.

Such terms are, for example

  • Thematically relevant: landscape types, age groups of people, activities that have been photographed a lot …
  • Situational: indoor / outdoor, day / night, studio / event …
  • Exclusive: Nobody (no people visible) …
  • Dominant colors: blue, orange, green, multicolored …
  • Frequently used names of events, people, buildings …
  • Image properties: HDR, monochrome, vector graphics …
  • Viewing angle: from above, from below, from the side, looking into the camera …

Such words should be very easily accessible in your keywording software. So-called QuickLists are available in KIM Keywording, which can be freely filled with terms from the keyword structure. When applying, not only the one word, but also the hierarchical keyword structure is taken along. QuickLists are therefore always available and thus allow a high degree of consistency in terms of keywords.

 

Strategic approach

Anyone who proceeds strategically with keywording can achieve high quality by repeating the same process over and over again. You achieve efficiency by optimizing this process. The software can help with this, but it is equally important that you have a clear picture of what you want to achieve with the keywording.

  1. Who should find your pictures? How and what is searched for?
  2. On which platforms would you like to publish your pictures? What are the requirements for keywording?
  3. How should subsequent improvements be maintained?
  4. Which options should be taken into account for the future (multilingualism, data export)

Think results-oriented. You may need to adjust your keywording strategy for different projects. Do this if it improves the result. The photographer is not the user of the image. What the photographer thought of the picture is often of little relevance. The decisive factor is how the end user can find the image. If, for example, certain expressions apply within an industry or company culture, if certain abbreviations are used or if a certain language is spoken, then this should be taken into account in the keywording.

A bridge is built with keywording. It is the bridge between the image (the photographer) and the end user of the images. Keywording can be considered successful if the bridge can be used by many.