Tag Archives: database

Updating Your Keywording Standards

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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.

Airliners versus Jetphotos

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I bounce backwards and forwards about whether I am interested in the two most prevalent of the online aircraft photograph databases, Airliners.Net and Jetphotos.Net.  I have pictures on both services and they have (very) occasionally brought some useful contacts my way.  Getting images on to their databases can be a frustrating process if you let it since they have very specific requirements about what they accept and what they want.

They own their websites and they can have what they want on there.  If I don’t like it, I am sure they won’t be losing sleep and recognizing this a while back made my life a lot less stressful!  Indeed, I stopped uploading to Airliners.Net and focused on Jetphotos for a while.  They became similar in their issues over time and I stopped bothering altogether.  It hadn’t done much for me so I didn’t see the need.

Every once in a while, I thought it might be useful to have something further there based on the occasional contacts I got.  Therefore, I would get back into the idea of creating edits of my images for the websites.  However, I now make the edits, submit the shots and, if they are accepted, fine.  If not, fine a well.  I am not chasing database statistics with these people.

I have recently come across a few shots of mine that I thought might be good for the sites so made the edits and uploaded to each site.  This was one of those moments when I wanted to compare them in their acceptance policy.  They have a desire for a high level of sharpening but don’t like things to be over-sharpened.  They also can have different views as to what over-processing is – something I like since they often reject for that when I have done very little processing at all!

I have now got the results back and it continues to amuse.  Both sites have accepted some and rejected others.  The fun comes from the fact that they have taken very different approaches to their analysis.  Airliners have rejected some things that were accepted by Jetphotos.  Similarly Jetphotos have rejected some that Airliners accepted.  Rejections were often for similar reasons but for different images.  Is there any rhyme or reason?  I don’t know.  I used to appeal shots that I thought they had been incorrect on.  Now I don’t bother.  Will this ever change?  Probably not.  Will I change my approach?  Probably not.  Does it matter?  Probably not.  The most important thing is to not get stressed about this stuff I guess.