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I just figured out search for some photos of my daughter that if I skip these buzz keywords I am instantly finding them. Otherwise they are buried by tons of images on top of them.

That was actually spiderpic so on all major sites.

I started replacing "Caucasian" with "European". I live in USA and she was born here but for us Europeans, Caucasian sounds to much Asian, which technically correct but it is how we feel :-) If I would use just word "white" for race it carries some sort of stigma here in USA :-) What a mess :-)

I think that some keywords are over used and now we have no choice but include them.

The other thing is cultural difference. People in Europe would never search for Caucasian. They will type white or European.

My other observation is often miss use of words "infant" and "toddler". Search for newborn and you got images of walking children and vice-versa.

In IS, Caucasian and European refer to the same thing with the disambiguation.

National Geographic often uses the term "Latino" as if it is a race different than Caucasian/white. I never understood this division and in fact I don't know what I am to NatGeo, being a Latin American, but not Hispanic, descendant of Europeans.

OK maybe phrasing of the subject is bad. I meant that if I use most popular search terms I cannot find my pictures buried under thousands of others but without them I can find them quickly.  I am not talking about using weird keywords cause I will be only person who will find my picture. I am talking about precise set of relevant keywords which uniquely identify subject.

Most of the sites actually suggest to use minimum number of relevant keywords. General practice is to include all possible synonyms of relevant keywords just in case.  I understand that people keyword for search engines not to correctly describe images. It's not relevant for every picture of a woman to have word "attractive" and every child to have word "cute". Keywording become a social activity. If most people think that these words give the best results they will include them. Basically search for  similar image to yours and collect first 30 most popular words and your are done.  Yes, I read warning on almost every site about keyword spamming audits. Did it ever happen?

Okay, I'll give this one more try.  You don't seem to be able to understand what I am saying.   

I am not talking about spamming. Spam is an entirely different issue.   I am not talking about putting "attractive" or "cute" on pictures that don't apply.  I am ONLY suggesting that it is to your benefit to use RELEVANT synonyms in your keywording. 

As I said before, you are free to do what you want.  But you are giving out bad advice as though it is general wisdom. 

What is more important - that you be able to find your specific images easily with one or two words, or that buyers be able to find them using relevant search terms? 

Thanks for explaining Maria.  I don't know if its correct either. 

I can only go by my own experience, and my images place pretty well on most of the sites searches (except Istock, of course) and I would have included those words, if accurate to the picture.  To each their own...

I review keywords for a site (I realize that keywords work differently at different sites) and find that there is obvious, rampant abuse of terms such as cute, attractive, beautiful, sexy, colorful and even common terms like business or businessman (every laptop doesn't belong to a businessman). Oh, and healthy - not every image of a good looking woman or a plate of food is healthy. I find some words used over and over.

There are many people who put words like beautiful in every image - a flower, a woman, a mountain, a house, a plate of spaghetti, a stack of coins, flags, web icons - you get the picture. When close to half of all images on any one site are "beautiful" that word becomes meaningless and that might be what the OP is referring to.

In the example stated, when putting the terms "cute little girl" in the search field on one site you will get fewer results than just "little girl". You would assume that is better as it narrows the field (from 140,000 to 91,000) but additional words should be added to narrow those results even more. I guess I'm saying that using cute doesn't hurt but it doesn't really help. By the way "ugly little girl" only gets 19 results.

One of the reasons that these common adjectives become meaningless is that many contributors who are from foreign countries and who do not have an understanding of the english language simply copy and paste from other images. All it takes is one group of really bad keywords to multiply inaccuracies. I've had to review hundreds of images with the same obvious bad keywords and find that the contributors are all different. I just reviewed a series of images of coffee beans from many different contributors and they all had the words blue, delft and mug in them. They were simply roasted beans, no cup, nothing blue or delft. Obviously, the keywords were copied from a shot of a cup of coffee in a blue delft cup that is probably a good seller.

Very diplomatically put Digitalexpressions.  But Loop is right.  If the keyword isn't there, it isn't going to show in the results and you have lost a potential sale.

@coffeecup, thanks for sharing the inside view on keyword spam.  Really horrible that this is still going on to that degree!  The coffee bean example is both funny and pathetic at the same time.

Hope it is clear I am not advocating spamming or cutting and pasting keywords from other images.  Just including relevant wordsthat buyers are likely to search for.