MicrostockGroup

I have had a 500% increase in earnings since I have prioritized my key words on FT.
I recently uploaded over 200 new images to FT. The only thing I changed was I prioritized
all the keywords for each of the 200 plus images i uploaded.

In the past, all keywords were listed in Alpha order. I used to make about $35 - $40 every 2 months.
I started the policy of prioritizing the words in Jan of this year. It is now Feb and my earnings are $73
for this month alone (at the time of this post)

Now this is just an observation. It's not a scientific experiment. Too many other variables could be affecting
the amount of downloads: Better images, more designers DL'ing, more precise  key wording... etc

All in all, its a pain in the ass to list the keywords in any order other than random. However it may have paid
off in the long run for me.

The MIZ

This Fotolia thing was the reason I wrote my tagging script more than a year ago. My port of the past year is already priority-tagged, since me thinks other sites will follow this path soon with 3M+ photo databases.

Miz, you haven't had a 500% increase in earnings - what you had was 500% less income before simply because you didn't follow FT's instructions.  It has always been the case that only the first seven words count, and there has always been an instruction on the upload page to reorder words into priority order before pressing 'submit'.

Yes, you can celebrate your windfall, but you should also reflect on how much money you lost in previous years.

You now need to think about how you can change all your earlier uploads - most people think that reordering existing keywords doesn't work, so the only other option is deleting all existing images and 'starting again'.

I definitely prefer your positive approach to it instead of crying over spilt milk although Hatman is quite right

very funny

Miz I agree that life is best with the 'half full' approach.  But you've missed my point: you haven't solved the problem - you've got two years worth of images that are not keyworded properly and somehow you've got to address that problem or they will continue to be lost in FT's system and earn a derisory income.  You can piss on the past if you wish - just make sure you don't piss all over your own pictures.

Me too, a 100% increase with FT in the past few months.  My theory is that they have taken some of istocks customers, after their big price rise.  This might be the reason why istock is having a sale.

It is a bit of a pain, but I have gotten into the habit of ordering all of my keywords in IPTC with Fotolia in mind.  That way the work only has to be done one time.

it is stated by fotolia's forum moderators that reordering doesn't change anything. you have to get it right before you hit submit

no wonder my sales suck big time at Fotolia - i use Aperture to manage my photos and it reorders all my keywords sorting by alpha. i'll never get a break at Fotolia this way

Same thing in Lightroom but I do reorder them manually in FT. It's worth it! Just good business. 

Apparently many people use FlemishTagger looking into my bandwidth logs. Well, there must be many lurkers around on forums ;-)

I wrote the script for myself actually, 1.5 years ago after finding out the 7-keyword Fotolia thing. It seemed to me that more sites would adopt this priority scheme sooner or later, and anyways it's only 10 sec extra work clicking the keywords in the right order.

The whole thing actually started with LO end of 2006 when they had problems with inter-keyword separators. I first wrote the script to easily output the list comma, comma-space, semicolon, or newline separated. You can do that with notepad or MSWord too of course, but you can make typos and you have to type. I'm very lazy by nature and just like to click ;-)

Then I added sorting, and finally spell check plus templates. There is also a high-watermark when you exceed 50 (or whatever) keywords.

The help files probably reflect those "organic" changes over time and aren't that clear any more. If anybody is really interested, I would streamline the help.
It has some hidden Easter eggs, like highlighting incompatible keywords for ShutterStock. Once got a warning for that.

I'm currently looking into the Princeton lexical database of synonyms and  more/less general terms to suggest extra keywords and maybe disambiguation. I think Duncan's heuristic method on CanStockPhoto is basically flawed. But for now, I'm just concentrating on my port for a while ;-)

OMG, that Fotolia interface is sooo slow, and it will order your tags only on the site, not in your IPTC. I got so tired end 2006 to sort them on the site I wrote a script just for that, and save the sorted tags into my IPTC.