MicrostockGroup

What is your experience with IS rejections related to 'wrong' keywording?

I had several weird rejections in the last weeks. Example: Submitted a studio shot of a textbook. It got rejected because it had 'education', 'school' and 'indoors' in the keywords. Come on...

Is this a new approach for penalizing non exclusives?

You might have a point regarding the term 'indoors' but shouldn't 'school' and 'education' be essential keywords for a textbook shot?

There were lots of forum discussions about things like this and the policy was made pretty clear. You cannot include conceptual keywords for things that might be true about the image unless they were suggested by something in the image - something explicit. So education needed to have more than one isolated object (pencil, book, desk, etc.). School is just flat out spam unless there's a shot of a classroom or school building or something like that. Imagine if you were a buyer looking for a shot of a school and found masses of isolated books? If someone wants a shot of an isolated book or textbook, they can easily search for that.

Please do a search for 'book' and 'school'. About 90 per cent of the results qualify for spam according to your definition. This includes a lot of younger images too.

It's quite simple. The idea is that people would be more careful about keywords when they upload an image.

My only complaint when I see the stretched terms being removed (like discussed recently in another thread) is that this removal is done only in new submissions or in wiki'ed images, making these "correctly keyworded" images lose ground to the "wrongly" ones.  If someone searches for Valentine's Day and my roses-on-satin images are not show because this keyword was removed, I'm behind of chocolate-boxes where this keyword is still shown.

In this sense I think the most correct thing would be having keywords accepted at submission and not edited afterwards (like BigStock did), even though this meant not adding later forgotten relevant keywords. 

I disagree however that buyers look for specific keywords only. Yes, one would look for "chocolate boxes" is this is what he wanted for his Valentine ad, flyer, website, whatever.  But as DT's "keywords used by buyers" show, some also search for images in a broader way.

FT's idea of prioritizing the first seven keywords could allow a very powerful search tool, with the "stretches" left to a secondary relevance.  Unfortunately we all know searches there do not work well either.

Regards,
Adelaide

Gunnar, I don't think it's because you are new.  IS has been calling things so tight of yet I can barely get an image through and I've been with them over 3 years.  I recently got a keyword rejection for multicolored ball of yarn.  I mentioned all of the colors of the yarn in the tags and the rejection notice said the keywords were not "fully relevant to the subject."  Oh, come on...  SS, DT, and SX gave me no trouble with this.  I realize the need to cut down on spamming but this doesn't make sense at all.

Try submitting to Scout, I've got quite a few over turned of late.

I usually have several rejects of this type every week, but today I think I had the worst. Check for yourself:



Rejected for:

{[ Beautiful,  Blond Hair,  Blond Hair,  Elegance,  Enjoyment,  lay down,  Relaxation]}

The girl is blond, I know her perfectly. Elegance for the dress, ok, bad idea...enjoyment (a book)...ok, bad idea...relaxation? reading a book in the park is not relaxation? Well...bad again, too "abstract" for them. Lay down...? Beautiful???!?!?

So, if a client is searching for beautiful woman reading, mi pic doesn't match. If looking for woman laying down grass...doesn't match, if the client needs a blonde...mi model doesn't match?

This hurts more because I make about 100 pictures a week, and IS only lets me upload 15. Resubmitions are not an option for me

On sites that allow adjusting keywords after an image is online, I submit with minimal keywords, then add the rest afterwords.  Never had a problem.

Next probable rejection :
"We found this file over filtered from its original appearance/quality."...

They aren't spam. They are relevant conceptual keywords. Just like "new year's" is relevant to your picture of a cake with 2009 on it. Things don't have to be physically present in an image to be relevant. Otherwise, "white", "cake", and "2009" would be the only keywords you could use for that image, and * near no one would find the image because they probably weren't searching specifically for a cake - they just were searching for something relevant to the new year. A lot of searches are done with that frame of mind - a general search term, hoping to find a good idea to use in a design.

Depending on the actual photo of the textbook, they may be very relevant. Since Istock turned Draconian in their keyword rejections for non-exclusives, it would have been nice to make their expectations a little clearer. I know there was an article written about it that I only found after a long search. If they just said what they are looking

IStockphoto.com is losing a lot of great images due to the silliness of their reviewers, who seem to both try to find any reason to reject an image yet often do not seem to understand some really obvious things about stock, microstock, and photography in general. Istock only hurts itself by trying to muscle photographers into exclusivity by doing things like myopic keyword rejections for non-exclusives. I find it hard to believe that anyone would want to dedicate themselves to an agency that openly disrespects their contributors so badly. Things like purposefully making the upload process inefficient, rejecting images outright, just for keywords that really are relevant,  and setting ridiculous upload limits in the hopes that then people will only contribute their best images - these things just make it harder to earn money as a contributor. There are better ways to encourage quality - ways that don't punish the contributors that are the basis for every cent that the company has made, but Istock chooses the short term gain over building a good relationship with their contributors. That is why so many of us refuse to go exclusive, and never will. Too bad for them.

Frankly, if we as contributors did not put up with Istock, they wouldn't get away with this crap. I personally don't put much effort into my portfolio at that site, because I can make lots more money quicker at other sites more efficiently. Istock's loss, the other sites' gains.

Although a lot of the keyword rejections are BS, the guy above was right - just keyword the stupidly obvious things and add the rest later. If it isn't giant and centered, the reviewers can't understand it, but your image will not get rejected if you add some conceptual ones after approval.

No, they aren't.  Why don't you keyword it "library, bookshop, etc" and anywhere else you find a book?  How about "tree", since books are made of paper, which comes from trees?

BTW, Gizeh, how about providing your iStock link, so we can see some of your other examples of keywording prowess, since you've seemed to take time to examine mine?