MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Adobe Stock => Topic started by: MatHayward on June 21, 2022, 09:58
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Hi Everyone,
I am very pleased to announce an upgrade to the Adobe Stock Contributor Portal. We have changed the indexing interface from auto keywords on assets with no embedded metadata, to auto-keyword suggestions powered by Adobe Sensei for all uploads.
Sensei will recommend up to 25 keywords for all content, including assets with embedded keywords which you can review and select to add.
I gave it a test run before we went live with some content I had already embedded and found good success with words I hadn't thought to add. For you veteran contributors, it will be a nice supplement, for those of you new to stock, this will likely result in great improvement in the quality of your keywording overall.
Check it out and let us know what you think,
Mat Hayward
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Great update !
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Super Mat and thank you, however I rather miss a tool that puts my keywords in a promising order ;)
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Super Mat and thank you, however I rather miss a tool that puts my keywords in a promising order ;)
My advice is to embed keywords before uploading with the most relevant keywords listed in the top ten. Then, when you upload to Adobe Stock, you can quickly review suggested keywords and add anything you may have missed.
Mat Hayward
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I uploaded a file this afternoon - fully keyworded - and looked at the suggestions, wondering if there was anything I might have missed.
All of the suggestions (except for the word red which was already in my list) were completely wrong - not marginal, just wrong. You can see the screenshot of that part of the UI along with a thumbnail of what I uploaded.
Description: "Shattered glass covers the shower floor after the door exploded, leaving the bathmat in a pile of glass pieces"
Will the people who implemented this be looking at uploads over the next few weeks to assess the usefulness of the tool's suggestions? If keywords are uploaded (and you can see some of mine), does the tool consult those to assess whether its guess about the image content is on the right track or off in the weeds?
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I thought I'd upload a second file with very different content to see how the suggestion tool managed compared to the earlier example. Better, but still had problems with suggesting things that weren't in the image.
Description: "Merrymeeting Lake with early morning sun peeking through the trees"
There were minor details such as suggesting summer (lower case s) when I had Summer (initial capital) already included. I had trees plural and it suggested tree as well. I'd quibble about park (because it isn't; and there's a property release as it's a home, so that should be a clue); mountain (I had hills and I'd have put mountains if they were higher).
Bigger issues were suggesting beach, bench, chair and table which aren't anywhere in the image. And suggesting sea and river for a picture of a lake is just spam, as is suggesting spring and autumn for an image keyworded summer.
Getting good keywords is hard, but having bad keywords on images will just frustrate the heck out of buyers. If I'm looking for a New Hampshire lake in Autumn and this picture shows up, it isn't helpful.
What about adding to the interface to let the contributor mark bad suggestions, at least for a while, to help train the tool to do a better job?
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Hello Mat, for me it works.
ADDITIONNAL KEYWORDS
I have keyword in the images and the update does offer me addiotional ones on top of what I already had that makes sense (my area of activity being nature close up photography). Also there are other keywords in the list that do not make sense , but that is not an issue ... I just don't choose/pick them.
Also takes me less time to 'push through' the image for approval
PRIORITIZING KEYWORDS ?
Unless I mssed soemthing it does not seem to be necessary to prioritize the keywords anymore ? As I do not immediatelly see how to eventually push forward specific keywords. I left them in the order they are.
SHORT : for me it adds correct hints to extra keywords and takes me less time to uplaod ... so nice update indeed !
@Jo Ann Snover : I like your images ;-)
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Just tested it with some images. My experience is similar to what Jo Ann wrote. There are very few useful additions to what I already have in the keywords, many irrelevant suggestions and several that are plain wrong.
Example for wildlife (bird) images: Although the AI detects and repeats the exact species in the image (as keyworded by myself) with both common and scientific names, it also adds several other bird species, which are completely wrong. That leads to massive spamming and frustrated customers.
Another example: an image of the cathedral in Erfurt, Germany, gets Prague as keyword suggestion.
Looks to me like the "a" part in "AI" works fine, but the "i" needs a lot of improvement...
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Thank you for the feedback. To answer Jo Ann's question first, it's unlikely we'll see a lot of progress within weeks, but yes I do believe this update will improve the data used for Sensei keyword "learning" over time. Some subjects are already better than others but there is room for improvement in all categories. This is why this feature is something I am really happy about. I know that some new contributors were simply pushing content through to moderation with all auto-keywords in place and untouched. That wasn't ideal for anyone. This update will require a little bit more work for them, but so much more accuracy which should result in increased visibility and sales. For you veteran contributors, most of you I know are embedding keywords prior to upload so it will have little effect unless you want to put the effort into reviewing the suggestions.Personally, I intend to do this because I have already learned I'm often missing some obvious words when doing bulk indexing. It's proven to be useful in my workflow.
It is still important you list the most relevant keywords in the top 10. Very important. Don't skip this step.
I do expect to see the quality of suggested keywords improve with time thanks to your efforts in selecting the accurate recommendations and skipping the others.
Please keep the feedback coming and let me know if you have any questions or concerns,
Mat Hayward
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The user wastes too much time in ordering the keywords according to their order of importance. Before any other new modification Adobe should focus on solving this problem.
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The user wastes too much time in ordering the keywords according to their order of importance. Before any other new modification Adobe should focus on solving this problem.
Totally agree with you.
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The user wastes too much time in ordering the keywords according to their order of importance. Before any other new modification Adobe should focus on solving this problem.
Totally agree with you.
+1
And, as I have previously said in some other thread: It would already save a lot of time if the keyword list would not skip back to the top each time you sort one keyword, so you don't have to go through the whole keyword list again and again and again. That's just a tiny technical change, that would already bring a lof of improvement.
The whole sorting is annoying, of course, but I understand that it would require some major changes to the whole search algorithm or the implemention of an AI that sorts them for you, but the annoying skipping back to the top? Should no take more than 10 minutes to fix.
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I can't be the only one that tinkers/optimises keywords offline in LR and then would like the ability to be able to batch-copy all of them to a particular, already accepted, image? I can't seem to find a way to quickly do that at Adobe, instead I'm left at entering keywords one by one - which I'm just not going to do.
Any suggestions, tips, tricks?
/Fox
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I can't be the only one that tinkers/optimises keywords offline in LR and then would like the ability to be able to batch-copy all of them to a particular, already accepted, image? I can't seem to find a way to quickly do that at Adobe, instead I'm left at entering keywords one by one - which I'm just not going to do.
Any suggestions, tips, tricks?
/Fox
Does Adobe LR allow you to rank, order keywords or is it still alphabetical?
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I can't be the only one that tinkers/optimises keywords offline in LR and then would like the ability to be able to batch-copy all of them to a particular, already accepted, image? I can't seem to find a way to quickly do that at Adobe, instead I'm left at entering keywords one by one - which I'm just not going to do.
Any suggestions, tips, tricks?
/Fox
Does Adobe LR allow you to rank, order keywords or is it still alphabetical?
Lightroom displays keywors in alphabetical order, though when you import into Adobe Stock, the keywords are reverted to the order in which you added them. It's not perfect, but it's an improvement over years past.
There is no way to do bulk edits to content that is online in your portfolio. I don't anticipate that ever changing for a number of reasons. You should really spend the time to get your keywords positioned properly and complete before you submit for review. If you are struggling with a high rejection rate which makes you feel you are spinning your wheels with keywording, that is a bigger issue that needs to be addressed.
Thanks again for the feedback,
Mat Hayward
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Thanks Mat. I'll just stick to C1 for now then. The day LR allows for manual ordering of keywords I'll be able to drop C1. I did some testing in the past and enjoyed using both classic and mobile LR but I still had to use C1 for keywording so it was just complicating my workflow using LR.
Here's hoping they'll allow it some day soon!
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Thanks Mat. I'll just stick to C1 for now then. The day LR allows for manual ordering of keywords I'll be able to drop C1. I did some testing in the past and enjoyed using both classic and mobile LR but I still had to use C1 for keywording so it was just complicating my workflow using LR.
Here's hoping they'll allow it some day soon!
Lightroom does keep the order you add your keywords. They are only displayed alphabetically in Lightroom, the portal lists them in the order you add them.
-Mat
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Uh oh Jo Ann, what happened to your shower!
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Uh oh Jo Ann, what happened to your shower!
Either an alien invasion, or spontaneous disintegration of tempered glass :) Fortunately I wasn't in it at the time - it sounded like a gunshot had gone off in the house. As with all house-related things, never miss an opportunity to find a stock image or two as a result!
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Uh oh Jo Ann, what happened to your shower!
Either an alien invasion, or spontaneous disintegration of tempered glass :) Fortunately I wasn't in it at the time - it sounded like a gunshot had gone off in the house. As with all house-related things, never miss an opportunity to find a stock image or two as a result!
I have heard of this exploding glass phenomenon but fortunately, never actually experienced it.
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Thanks Mat. I'll just stick to C1 for now then. The day LR allows for manual ordering of keywords I'll be able to drop C1. I did some testing in the past and enjoyed using both classic and mobile LR but I still had to use C1 for keywording so it was just complicating my workflow using LR.
Here's hoping they'll allow it some day soon!
Lightroom does keep the order you add your keywords. They are only displayed alphabetically in Lightroom, the portal lists them in the order you add them.
-Mat
Interesting, I put this in the "you learn something every day" category. I had no idea that Lightroom stored the keywords in the file in the order they were put in. Of course here's a question: If I keyword the RAW file in LR and then generate a jpg in Lightroom from that file, will the keywords in the jpg be in alphabetical or the ordered I entered them in for the RAW file?
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Thanks Mat. I'll just stick to C1 for now then. The day LR allows for manual ordering of keywords I'll be able to drop C1. I did some testing in the past and enjoyed using both classic and mobile LR but I still had to use C1 for keywording so it was just complicating my workflow using LR.
Here's hoping they'll allow it some day soon!
Lightroom does keep the order you add your keywords. They are only displayed alphabetically in Lightroom, the portal lists them in the order you add them.
-Mat
Interesting, I put this in the "you learn something every day" category. I had no idea that Lightroom stored the keywords in the file in the order they were put in. Of course here's a question: If I keyword the RAW file in LR and then generate a jpg in Lightroom from that file, will the keywords in the jpg be in alphabetical or the ordered I entered them in for the RAW file?
It should maintain the order of keywords as you originally listed them. You can actually upload RAW files directly from Lightroom and the JPG conversion will happen automatically to save you an additional step.
-Mat
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I feel compelled to add one more example of suggested keywords. I cannot imagine how this mundane image got so misinterpreted.
I know I don't have to choose wrong/spam keywords, but it just seems that there's something fundamental amiss when a photo of pallets of paving stones in a driveway gets suggestions of sea, beach, boat, sky, and pollution (among others). I included a full list of my keywords to show they can't have been behind any of the off-base suggestions.
I think a few suggestions were closer to reasonable, even though I didn't use them - such as tree, concrete, waste - but I hope somehow those working on this feature will look at how utterly wrong the AI's guess at the image's objects was, not just note that I ignored the suggestions.
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An update basically to say that nothing (that I can see) has improved with the keyword suggestions. It would be completely wrong - misleading for the buyer - for this image to have most of the keywords suggested. Christmas, candy, bow, cane, valentine, food, xmas, candy cane, gift...
Interesting that although it picked out red, it didn't get white or blue (the other two colors in the ribbon). It could have picked Bastille Day or another celebration from a country with red, white and blue flag colors.
And as far as choosing heart, the data set this was trained on must have included the world's worst images of hearts :)
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An update basically to say that nothing (that I can see) has improved with the keyword suggestions. It would be completely wrong - misleading for the buyer - for this image to have most of the keywords suggested. Christmas, candy, bow, cane, valentine, food, xmas, candy cane, gift...
Interesting that although it picked out red, it didn't get white or blue (the other two colors in the ribbon). It could have picked Bastille Day or another celebration from a country with red, white and blue flag colors.
And as far as choosing heart, the data set this was trained on must have included the world's worst images of hearts :)
Thanks Jo Ann,
We are aware there are some "challenges" with auto-keyword suggestions. I do not anticipate dramatic changes to take place overnight. These auto keyword challenges are precisely the reason I pushed so hard to have the UI changed to what you see today. Some contributors were simply submitting files as they were with all auto-keywords added by default. They were not removing or re-sorting them. This was not ideal for anyone.
What I suspect is that in most cases with contributors that are here in MSG, most were embedding metadata before uploading. Because of that, the auto-keywords were never seen. Now that the auto keywords are "suggested" for all files whether they have embedded metadata or not, many of you are seeing them for the first time.
I have had conversation with the search team and I do believe this new data generated from you manually clicking to add the auto-keywords will help tremendously in the "learning" process. However, it will take time. For now, do what you've always done with embedding keywords, take a quick look at the suggestions and click to add anything listed that you didn't think of on your own. I have found personally at least 5 or 6 relevant suggestions to add to nearly every file I've submitted since this change has taken place.
-Mat Hayward
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I found it very useful to identify occasional keywords that I missed. Nice improvement.
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I use the file info service in photoshop. Unlike Bridge it keeps words in priority order and allows a template to be saved so that all info can be applied to images from a particular shoot. I don't use Lightroom so can't comment on that.