anyone else tired of getting rejects because the bigstock category guessing 'feature' keeps making ridiculous suggestions?   i just had several images of mountain lakes and forest rejected as wrong category because BS suggested the category 'christmas', or just because an image was taken in India it adds 'places/travel'  which does not describe the actual image of an elephant on a colored bkgd

s

I hate doing it, but I always fix their erroneous guesses.

I did once have a rejection because they wanted me to include an illustration category - on something that was  photograph of some painted objects. I did and changed the description to point out that it was a photograph just so buyers weren't confused.

I appreciate them trying to make a good guess, but I'd appreciate it even more if they just did away with that altogether and used keywords to pull together groups for buyers if they want to do that. It's a pain in the butt

Sometimes I tried to change them and somehow it didn't seem to stick - I think it defaulted to the top one in a category or something - which was really annoying and not always obvious. I don't have to submit there directly now, so I can't remember the details.

I saw an interview ages ago with Ellen Boughn (?) at DT where she stressed the importance of the categories in catching the attention of buyers.  Unfortunately, DT's aren't particularly good (but then that's true of almost everywhere).

BS has absolutely the WORST image categories.  Worthless.  Just about everything ends up in miscellaneous because there isn't a category for it.   

Quote from: OLJensa on January 21, 2013, 13:10

The best would be to get rid of the categories all together. I mean how many buyers actually use them???

Obviously enough to justify having them (similar to every other significant agency). I'd hazard a guess that they have a lot more data, on which to base such decisions, than you do.

do you also believe the agencies know what LCV is?  categories make no sense in  a database with milions of images

as far as getting different results when keywording AFTER choosing categories, that just makes the mess worse -- eg, if an image might be in categories mountains, travel, and sports - whats going to happen when a user searches for 'trekking nepal'? and gets very different results for each search?  and what happens if the user selects another category such as 'people' - now searching under that category wont ever find the image!

Does the bridge to BS use the same category chooser? If so the category system must be pretty useless, as usually I have to change one or more of the categories it selects, often all 3 from something completely off the wall for the image or the keywords.

All of the sites have some weird categories, I think it is BS that has winter as a place but none of the other seasons.

I don't know how it works from the bridge but I just looked at a dozen of mine and they all look pretty good.

I bulk my edits to the same type of images, then the defaults or guessed ones does not show and I pick my own 3. If I do a single one I always check the categories the system suggests, as for me they are only about 30% correct. So I mostly change them.

As for the category choices, I find Fotolia's to be by far the worst, especially the second one which has to be abstract or conceptual of nature (although there are non conceptual words in there as well). I can only find something suitable for about 50% of my images. Big waste of time going through all the lists twice just to find something half suitable (if you are lucky). BS's categories are a breeze by comparison.

Quote from: CD123 on January 23, 2013, 01:11

I bulk my edits to the same type of images, then the defaults or guessed ones does not show and I pick my own 3. If I do a single one I always check the categories the system suggests, as for me they are only about 30% correct. So I mostly change them.

As for the category choices, I find Fotolia's to be by far the worst, especially the second one which has to be abstract or conceptual of nature (although there are non conceptual words in there as well). I can only find something suitable for about 50% of my images. Big waste of time going through all the lists twice just to find something half suitable (if you are lucky). BS's categories are a breeze by comparison.

FT doesnt really care if you use categories -- so i just use the batch mode with 50 files at a time [more than that gets really slow], and enter a generic misc type category and submit - very fast

Seeing that no real stats exist on how many buyers make use of the categories, I still spend the time to get it as close as possible. Want to give my images every chance possible to pick up a sale,  although it can be a royal pain on certain sites.

you're still assuming that the categories you choose are the ones buyers will use -- it's a personal decision, but my conclusion is it's a waste of time - the stats i do get [eg, DT] show people are searching by keywords, not categories

it would help all of us if the agencies would be more transparent with OUR data

Obviously I do. Why else will I spend time trying to get it right? I also note that you still assume that it a waste of time. Until someone can come up with facts, I guess we both may assume what we like.