I provide a number of images to stock agencies. They require keywords to tack what is in the images. This has never been a problem because I have been keywording my images for a long time. Some people keep their images in folders based on shoots but I have, for a long time, been more bothered about putting keywords in for my shots. This way I can use Lightroom to find shots of any topic really easily.
However, I have become a lot more diligent about my keywording standards in recent times. I used to not get too bothered about adding too much detail to my keywords. Now, when I am looking for something, I search on a keyword but the result doesn’t show up an image that I know I have. When I look at older shots, the keywords are rather sparse and not as specific as they would be now.
The result is that I am making an effort to improve my old keywords. This is not a quick task. I find little fixes I can make for clusters of shots and implement those. It usually triggers something else I can do. I don’t try and do everything at once. I just build a list of little tasks and tackle them one by one. I am now also more diligent about keywording new shots more aggressively. Fixing this afterwards is a lot harder so now they all get tagged with everything relevant. I hope this will eventually pay off for me.