I posted a complaint about the system in their announcement thread, and they deleted it.  It was not profane or obnoxious.  It was a complaint.  And, I know it was posted at one time because someone replied to it.

One more thing.  I haven't had a sale yet today, a fairly unusual occurence.

Good going, Istock.

The forums are back up. Here is a quote from the admin

"Here is the place to report disambiguation problems. We are specifically looking for cases where the meaning you need assigned to a tag doesn't exist - not cases where the system assigned the wrong meaning to a tag. If the system assigned the wrong meaning, you can pick the right one with the checkbox. This is the place to report meanings that don't exist at all. "

In other words, we don't care how many of your images we screwed up, you will have to fix them yourself.

I've had a couple sales today. Both were images of pumpkins. Unless of course the keywords are to be believed, then they were either "Large Group of Animals", "Large Group of People", "Atlantic Ocean", "Showing", "Remote", "Figurine", or "Traditional Culture".

In other words, we don't care how many of your images we screwed up, you will have to fix them yourself.

In that thread a person asked what I was thinking... how exactly do you fix it? Seems like you click edit then have to write a reason why the keyword is not correct then somebody will review it? Sounds like it will take forever to fix all the errors. If somebody knows an easier way please let me know.

I tried to 'repair' a few of my pictures, but decided to let it go 'as is' for a while.  It is impossible to repair a category error when there is no other alternative correct category to checkmark, and taking off wrong categories without having a new one would greatly limit the exposure. 

So, for the time being, the breed of Pinto horses will be found in the bean food and the dog section...  It would take days to report each error and expect a follow-up 

I'm wondering what the designers will think about this 'improvement' when they do their search...

One last comment, and then I think I'll leave this issue behind.  If you think that correcting the keywords on your images will fix the problem, think again.  You are making changes in the English keywords.  As I and others have noted, there are also pretty big errors in the non-English translations.  What this means is that you cannot hope to have the keywording errors corrected unless you speak all the languages used by the Istock translation engine.

In the end, the keyword translations will open new markets.  But, we photographers will not reap the benefit we should.  We will see a minor increase in sales, but not nearly the increase we should because the file descriptors will be in error, making it hard for designers to find our images.  Instead, what will happen is that Istock will open up a huge market by and for customers who speak these other languages natively.  Chinese photographers, for example, will be best suited to take and keyword photos for Chinese buyers because they use language in similar ways.  Which will work better, I ask:  a Japanese photographer using Japanese keywords, or an English-speaking photographer relying on a translation engine to sell to a Japanese buyer?

I find this particular move by Istock to be the ultimate in arrogance.  To think that they could create a translation engine that would correctly translate the meanings of our keywords across different languages, each with its own set of idiomatic expressions and culturally-bound meanings, is ridiculous.  When Miriam Webster tried to define the English language, his initial attempts were abject failures for precisely the same reasons.  The only reason dictionaries work today is that the dictionary itself has introduced commonly accepted meanings and spellings into the culture (that, and the fact that mass media disseminate common language and symbols very efficiently).  It took over a hundred years to achieve this consistency and even today the enterprise of creating a dictionary is somewhat of a fool's errand, as words take on new meanings, new words are added to the lexicon, and others are removed.  Language is not a static entity.

Good luck to all of you in whatever future dealings you may have with Istock.

Yes, and several people have specifially asked about the Indiana problem on IS and those are some of the quesitons that are being pointedly ignored.

I've just discovered that 'bleachers' is another one. Five of my images have mysteriously acquired that keyword.

But, being a Brit, I'm not entirely sure what bleachers are (Are they a type of clothing?)

What kills me is how many people on the IS forums are saying how wonderful this new change is.

Yeah ... well ... if you enjoy going through all your keywords for every image again it is truly wonderful 

Nice work iStock.

I liked the concept in totallyphoto.com when you uploaded you had to 'define' the keywords and they built it up as they went along - so the data in the database was built by the photogs as they uploaded - and it seems to me to be a bit 'awkward' (to use my 11 year old's favorite word) to try to do that after the fact to 1,000,000 images - no offense istock, but this seems to be a mistake to me.

The worst part of it to me is that again, they didn't take the time to explain it and be prepared with the 'how to' guide with many of the answers in advance. If they'd just take the time to let people know what is going on and what to do to be ready and how to work it after it is implemented, they'd (and all of us) would be a lot better off.

Better yet, send out an email. I find the site, well, awkward, to use and annoying to navigate so I don't typically spend much time there except to upload and check sales. After hearing about the snafu here I went over there to check their forums. After the shock of reading the people praise this move I noticed that one of them mentioned a keyword wiki. Thinking it was announced and I just missed I began looking. Never did find such an announcement but I did see an interesting quote....

"Some of our images have great keywords, and some don't. We've spent a long, long time developing different methods of addressing this issue (Seriously, a long time. Like, months), but in the end, we decided that no one knows better than all of you. So now you can get involved with the keywords here at iStock."

... just struck me as funny. I guess since 6/30/2006 when this was posted they must have changed their mind.

Ok, finally took the time to go through the 200+ questions that have been posted in the 5 hours since they started with, "Here are the answers to the questions we're sure you have about the new system."

They have answered a select few questions. They have completely ignored those that ask why the system doesn't accept keywords from exif data or how do you expect me to go back and fix (500, 1200, 1500+, pick one) images thar are now broken.

It's going to get ugly

I think there is still a little benefit of the doubt, goodwill, and patience out there. It's only been 6 hours.

Ok, going to get uglier.