The social media (including Flickr, Instagram and similar) already are competing with and taking business from stock agencies.

Today many companies and organizations barely bother with their websites. The bulk of their client facing activity is now via Facebook. And much of the content which they use is stuff which the staff and clients ('friends') have shot and shared on their iPhones. The social media has directly and indirectly reduced the demand for content - especially for the sort of low cost content which microstock used to be about. Simultaneous these organizations have in general significantly reduced their printed output - eg documentation, media etc.

In this example the direct recommendation (share, like etc) replaces the need for keywording. The ubiquity of Facebok, especially in a business context, post dates the financial collapse of 2007/08 and the world recession which followed. Back then many more companies (even small businesses) still thought they needed an old fashioned website - and someone to build it for them. That is a lot of business which does not exist anymore.

mediums come and go, and the businesses are just following their users wherever they go, no matter if today it's Flickr/FB and yesterday it was MySpace and ICQ, pretty much anyone is basically test driving any option and seeing what sticks on the wall.

ultimately the collapse of printed medias and the traditional medias is irrilevant in the eyes of the younger generations as they're pretty much happy with netflix, youtube, and the socials.

the only ones still watching tv are women and babies, the only ones still buying newspapers are over-40 men.

what we're seeing now is just a transitional era that started being taken seriously just after the 90's and will go on for another decade in my opinion, let's say in 2020 paper will be definitely dead and forgotten and everyone will be online with 5G connections as fast as 1Gb, that means an unlimited supply of multimedia content, paid or free.

so what about photos ? photos will be more and more consumed and in demand BUT how this demand will be eventually monetized is still the million dollar question.

it's logic that in a vast ocean of images, i mean trillions or gazillions of free or paid images, keywording will be THE factor and this cannot be expected to be provided in any way by amateurs and random people uploading snapshots on Flickr or Instagram, it just takes too much time and it's no fun and even if they try they need a background on what a proper keywording is all about.

so, if keywording is terrible nowadays for free/semi-free images you can bet it will go totally down the drain in the next years until it will become just impossible to find what you need due to spam and bad keywording.

this cannot be solved by any magic algorithm as the search engines did with text content.
there's no artificial intelligence software able to classify images, the best you can get at the moment is face recognition and good luck with that ...

editing, selection, keywording, these things just cannot be automated in any way.
end of the story, and same goes for music and many other things, there will be always a place for agencies and people providing solutions to their customers.

i'm the first one saying you can find great free pics on PODs and Flickr/Instagram but that means wasting a few hours on those sites while you can buy an excellent stock image for 5-10 bucks in hi-res with a proper licence and you dont have to worry if the image is on focus or if it's noisy etc as it's been inspected and picked up by professionals before going on sale.

strictly speaking, you can't beat agencies in any  cost/benefit analysis.

the many bloggers and tech writers ranting and raving about a future where everything is free and provided by freetards is total bollocks, makes sense for bloggers and other things where quality doesn't matter but for anything else and especially for serious buyers agencies are here to stay.

as for FB/Twitter/LinkedIN replacing corporate websites, yes i agree and it's happening but it's a double edge sword because you can judge the value and professionalism of a company just by looking at their web site and FB page, so don't worry they will all reap what they saw and those don;t even have a proper web sites are just telling their clients they're a fly by night company who can't even afford to pay a web guy to make a few static html pages !

Good question. Worst I ever had was one rejected for something about keywords being inappropriate, not describing the image.

Never a warning.

It must take some hard pushing to get a warning? And three? I'd love to see what it takes and how far off someone has to be to get repeated keyword warnings?

Not a personal attack, I'd just like to see what set them off?

What kind of keyword spamming are we talking about? I have seen no examples? How do you keyword your images?

I should add that the image was rejected for something else and the keyword part was added as I'll assume, advise. I might be misleading what actually occurred with that one. It hasn't happened often, at most twice. One of the regulars on the IS forums corrected me.

I've had more Editorial returned for "misleading caption" when I left the USA out (I know strange way to tell me if left the country out) And two for misleading caption, lacking information.

They call something missing "misleading" it's a generic rejection catch all.

Similar here. The odd "wrong keyword" note. I'm exclusive so we don't get rejected for the odd word.
Can't understand why someone would even want to keyword as badly as some I've seen there. It's shooting yourself, and everyone else, in the foot as far as I can see.

What kind of keyword spamming are we talking about? I have seen no examples? How do you keyword your images?

At first he said he wasn't going to disambiguate for 16%, which in the old days would have meant the disambiguated words wouldn't have been searchable, but not nowadays.
Then he said, "I let Stocksubmitter do the submitting so the disambigution is automatic"
In the past, when keywording was regularly inspected there, by more than just Keywordzilla, a lot of people used to complain about keyword rejections by saying they were using somesort of keyword suggester or program, which never seemed to be up to the task. I have no idea if Stocksubmitter is better than the rest of the bunch. (Nieces and nephews also came in for blame rather often.)

Quote from: ShadySue on December 06, 2014, 13:41

Quote from: Noedelhap on December 06, 2014, 12:02

What kind of keyword spamming are we talking about? I have seen no examples? How do you keyword your images?

At first he said he wasn't going to disambiguate for 16%, which in the old days would have meant the disambiguated words wouldn't have been searchable, but not nowadays.
Then he said, "I let Stocksubmitter do the submitting so the disambigution is automatic"
In the past, when keywording was regularly inspected there, by more than just Keywordzilla, a lot of people used to complain about keyword rejections by saying they were using somesort of keyword suggester or program, which never seemed to be up to the task. I have no idea if Stocksubmitter is better than the rest of the bunch. (Nieces and nephews also came in for blame rather often.)

The words that aren't disambiguated are seachable? I thought they were ignored.

They certainly seemed to be ignored (unsearchable), but I think that's been changed.

One problem is that new words are constantly being added to iS's CV (but not in parallel at Getty, I wonder if that will be brought into line), accelerating with editorial words and locations. They used to produce a list of new words every couple of weeks or so on the keyword forum, but AFAIK, they haven't done that for a while.

What can happen therefore is that a word which didn't have any DA when you uploaded a file now has a choice and you don't know about it. Therefore your file can show up on a wrong keyword, because you didn't know there was a DA, therefore your file now shows up on a search for another DA of the word you correctly keyworded on upload.
This means that even strict keyworders can have their files showing up on wrong searches, but it would be unfair if your file was ignored in a search because you had no way of knowing that a keyword you had appended correctly years ago was now subject to disambiguation.
That problem often occurs with e.g. locations - e.g. Scotland could now be Scotland (UK) or Scotland (Texas) whereas when I started, there was only Scotland. (I see that Scotland (Texas) is only a tiny village of about 500 people, so I can't imagine why it was added to the CV.)
It is a real mess, though.

The biggest problem with the iStock keywording system is the word association. For example, on an image for Christmas Cupcakes in a party setting, PARTY FOOD becomes BUFFET, and FESTIVE becomes CELEBRATION, and then you get keyword rejection on BUFFET and CELEBRATION, when that was not intended.

Can someone tell me what to do about that?

Either I decide not to bother with that keyword, or if it's vital, I usually quit the upload and send to Alamy RM instead, if possible.

However, presumably you are able to post to the Keyword forum over on iStock? And to SM ducksandwich directly.

The biggest problem with the iStock keywording system is the word association. For example, on an image for Christmas Cupcakes in a party setting, PARTY FOOD becomes BUFFET, and FESTIVE becomes CELEBRATION, and then you get keyword rejection on BUFFET and CELEBRATION, when that was not intended.

Can someone tell me what to do about that?

That crap happens all the time and relevant keywords become irrelevant. Quite silly and limiting.

Frankly, I am just getting tired of all the iStock problems. Is it all worth my time and hassle? Probably not.

FESTIVE is a word that buyers frequently search on. I used to be a buyer, and also on another site that tells you what buyers search on to buy your image, FESTIVE comes up a lot.

So, if the only solution is to add notes to the reviewer or keep posting on forums, I don't have the time to waste on that. So I wont use that keyword. I will just give them few images a week (because its too time-consuming to re-keyword everything you give to other agencies) and only use 3 or 4 keywords per image and leave it that. But I think iStock is shooting themselves in the foot, if that's what other contributors end up doing.

I have some like that where none of the coices are right and I leave them uncheck, then the word is not searched. Or pick a bad disambig and have the word found. It's broke.

Quote from: Noedelhap on December 06, 2014, 12:02

What kind of keyword spamming are we talking about? I have seen no examples? How do you keyword your images?

At first he said he wasn't going to disambiguate for 16%, which in the old days would have meant the disambiguated words wouldn't have been searchable, but not nowadays.
Then he said, "I let Stocksubmitter do the submitting so the disambigution is automatic"
In the past, when keywording was regularly inspected there, by more than just Keywordzilla, a lot of people used to complain about keyword rejections by saying they were using somesort of keyword suggester or program, which never seemed to be up to the task. I have no idea if Stocksubmitter is better than the rest of the bunch. (Nieces and nephews also came in for blame rather often.)

I use Stocksubmitter as well, and it has the same disambiguation system as the regular Istock submitting page.

As you well know I am banned sine die from the forums and sitemail - four years and counting. I contacted the address I was given to discuss this and got no reply. One time apparently because of a bug I accidentally got back on. Thinking the ban was ended I made an innocuous post and got a nasty email from the banner telling me he had no idea how I'd got on but he wasn't having it and would ensure I was kept off. Interesting,  with all the major bugs on the site that one was top priority.
Truth is they never added keywords which weren't likely to be widely used,  but as noted above before this low priority bug you could always add a keyword 'for your own use'.Still it's only where I have to crop in tightly that there's a problem. Otherwise like I said above I abort the upload.

"Phoenicurus moussieri"

I'll bet you $20 nobody has ever in the past, or will in the future, search for that term, aside from keyword experimentation.

"Phoenicurus moussieri"

I'll bet you $20 nobody has ever in the past, or will in the future, search for that term, aside from keyword experimentation.

It's an unprovable bet, but why wouldn't they? It's by far the best way to search on species, as far fewer people bother to spam scientific keywords, so you normally get a much cleaner search other than 'genuine mistakes'.