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Yeah, someone is on a tear at DT. I had a batch of these back when they first started. I replied to all as the flagged keyword was appropriate and never heard or saw anything else about it. Six months later, I have had a dozen flagged today and yesterday. First one I opened, called Front Door and Umbrella is a picture of a front door and an umbrella. Keyword flagged is umbrella. I closed it and ignored the rest. Not worth the trouble. Flag it, don't flag it, keep it, delete it, whatever. I'm not going to spend time justifying a top 10 seller that's been on the site for three years.

DT is a fly by night company.

maybe they outsourced to India and the indians there expect "queen's english" in the keywords ?

I would like to see all the micro-engines accept keyword phrases rather than breaking up all the data into single strings. It seems like it would be the most logical solution.

In another post somebody mentioned getting flagged for the color blue and their subject was a blue collar worker. If we were able to use the keyword phrase "blue collar worker" instead of "blue", "collar", "worker" there would be no confusion in the flagging process plus there should be an improvement in search results for the buyers. Is the buyer looking for my photos of a person with brown hair and blue eyes or blue hair and brown eyes .. with single keywords there is no way of knowing.

I got a bunch of them today, too, and all from just two people. 

Several were on photos of angel food cake, which were uploaded when we couldn't hyphenate words and the search engine was designed to put the two words together in a search and bring up the image.  They changed the system  and now I have to go through and do....what?  I tried changing it to angelfood, as it is in similar images, but the system wouldn't take it.  Do buyers search with hyphens?  Oh, dear, what's a girl to do.

DT sometimes seems like a site doing its best to make itself crash.  Oh, dear, oh, dear.

But does the flagging of an image has any negative effects on it?  Like those keywords being ignored in a search?

I received a flag in an image for kangaroo also, it has no kangaroo in it, but a "kangaroo ball'.  Again, the problem of composed keywords.  It was flagged by a member from Australia, so perhaps she was looking for kangaroos and did not like to see an improper image in the results.  She is right, but I am not wrong either.

I was tempted . . . but no i didn't 

my thoughts exactly:)

And the problem is... ?
You get a flag/commment for bad keywords.
Next check all your keywords on reported images.
Remove irrelevant (if any).
Job done.

What's the big story?
And why is this move considered suicidal?


I have quite a few images at IStock with 5 keywords only.
Bare minimum allowed.
Had it been possible I would have used even less.
That's how much I hate spam.
Let them do it, errors aside, this is for the best.

This flagging system is in wrong hands when given to the public. Some people has no vision how the keywording works. Most of the flaggers do look at a single point and doesn't understand the whole. Others has no idea what is indirectly related to the image and what is really off subject.
Annoying examples:
- my car wheel image was flagged because of 'car' and 'black' words. 80% of the buyers searched for 'car wheel'. The poor flagger searched after 'black car' and voila, there is a wheel, nowhere the needed black car! He/she saw only one point, doesn't imagine that the system splits apart the words and actually the car is related to wheel, this is how the system works, since DT doesn't have controlled vocabulary.
- stupid example of a flagging of a beach illustration flagged on word 'beach'. I don't believe anymore in tales 'somebody accidentally flagged' because of the countless examples of this.

I had some images with wrong keywords, thanks for flagging, I removed the bad words, but it's very annoying that 90% of flaggings are wrong, steals extra time to reply why is the flagging incorrect and contact support to ignore the flagging state. I think, now support @DT is flooded with these stupid messages, also stealing precious time from them.

I think, this keywording stuff must be made by people who really understands the system, not by the public.

Eirann, please do understand that there are contributors with more than 10, 20 or 50 times more images in their portfolio than you do.

With up to 40 or 50 flagged images per day this is a major inconvenience. These photographers don't make a living by double checking invalid flags from Dreamstime.

Today, I found one of my best sellers reported AND my keywords locked for the keyword "ski" showing a skyline with 2 jet skiers in the foreground. Not to mention that the keyword "jet" was also removed.

I've made more money with that image than many photographers will ever make with their portfolios and now someone received a whopping 2 cents for reporting a valid keyword pushing my image out of the search for a water sport in front of a major tropical skyline. This is sick.

@Click - Click,
typical.
Since I haven't started uploading in 1963 (or thereabouts) my portfolio is small.
And that's the first thing you come up with.  
Anything else?
What about the quality of my images?
Are they ok with you? Any complains?
Now, that beeing said, let's try to leave my portfolio out of the debate and return to the subject on hand.

There are photographers who have portfolios 50 times larger than mine.
Well, I'm sorry to say, but I imagine the number of bad keywords growing proportionally.
Is it not a good idea to clean them up? After all they're the ones who cover most searches.

And I still can't see the problem.
Don't have the time to edit them all?
Let admins do it.
Errors?
Report them.
Losing a few sales?
Were they legitimate in the first place?

I believe cleaning keywords is a good idea, hassle or not.
And you haven't managed to convice me otherwise, regardless of the thousands of images in your portfolio.

If you would have followed this and the parallel topic which was merged into this one you'd realize that nobody is against reporting spammed keywords.

Removing spam is good - I hope this clarifies it for you!

It is not good to have thousands of images reported ALHTOUGH the keywords ARE CORRECT!!!

This is the problem we're discussing here that CORRECT KEYWORDS are being flagged BY ABUSERS OF THE SYSTEM!!!

Just because you wouldn't have to go through hundreds and hundreds of images IF they WOULD be flagged doesn't mean that OTHER contributors HAVE TO DO SO.

Regardless of how whiny you think we are - we are making a living off of this and if relevant keywords are being stripped from our images it's my *CENSORED* right to voice concerns about this system.

And if you haven't gotten my point yet!

SPAM IS BAD!!!

Well, to answer your question, the errors are 90% of the flags, just as Elena is reporting.  You can't really put them aside.  

No one is defending spam here. If you think that's what's going on, you are missing the point.(please refer to Click Click's post above subtly clarifying this point )

  If 90% of the flags reported are actually relevant and essential to the image then this is a seriously flawed system. And as Elena and others point out, it is damaging to Dreamstime on several levels:

1. It costs them money to pay reviewers to sort through all the flags, including the vast majority which are in error.
2. Correcting the errors costs contributors a lot of time, which results in lost productivity producing and uploading salable images.
3. Inevitably some bad flags will be approved and relevant words removed.  This will result in the following:
    a) reduced accuracy of search results = disgruntled buyers
    b) reduction of legitimate sales for contributors = disgruntled contributors
4. Ultimately buyers will migrate to sites that are not removing vast swaths of images from relevant searches, and contributors will focus their uploading efforts on sites that actually sell their work.

Personally, I have made no secret of the fact that DT has always been my favorite site.  But over the last year or so DT has fallen from 16-17% of my income to a consistent 12%.  As my numbers drop there I have less and less incentive to commit time to responding to DOZENS of inaccurate keyflags a day.  And like Elena, if my sales plummet further because of essential keywords removed from hundreds or thousands of my images, I will no longer have any incentive to upload there.