MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Adobe Stock => Topic started by: rjmiz on February 22, 2008, 15:57
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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
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The search on fotolia only finds the top 7 keywords:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php?topic=2409.msg35257;topicseen
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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.
This Fotolia thing was the reason I wrote my tagging script (http://www.flemishdreams.com/tag) 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.
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FlemishDreams
Can you elaborate on how to best use that link in ur post?
Looks interesting.
The MIZ
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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'.
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hatman12
You are wrong.... I live one day at a time. I piss on the past because it is of no use to me now. I can't change it.
What I can do is live for today, and plan for the future. It's not viewed as a loss to me. The glass is half full if
you get my drift.
Be well hatman12
The MIZ
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I definitely prefer your positive approach to it instead of crying over spilt milk although Hatman is quite right :)
hatman12
You are wrong.... I live one day at a time. I piss on the past because it is of no use to me now. I can't change it.
What I can do is live for today, and plan for the future. It's not viewed as a loss to me. The glass is half full if
you get my drift.
Be well hatman12
The MIZ
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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'.
What was never said however (I think) is that combined keywords don't count and therefore "Rio de Janeiro" must be "Rio, de, Janeiro", using three of the precious seven magic keywords. :(
Regards,
Adelaide
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hatman12
You are wrong.... I live one day at a time. I piss on the past because it is of no use to me now. I can't change it.
What I can do is live for today, and plan for the future. It's not viewed as a loss to me. The glass is half full if
you get my drift.
Be well hatman12
The MIZ
very funny :)
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rjmiz: You can delete the old files, improve the keywording and upload them again.
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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.
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Arranging keywords may have been a factor OK. but just to say that I have had a significant increase in sales recently - without altering keys.
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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.
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I seemed to remeber being told by a member of MSG that not only the order is important, but it is equally important to sequence them in the proper order if they read in a specific fashion
Crystal, Blue, Sky
Race, Car
Puppy, Dog
Mark
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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.
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I have recently gotten in the habit as well - I've been doing this stuff for 2 years now, and never noticed the "fine print" that the first 7 keywords should be the most important. That sucks, ah well. I have done really well on FT...I can only imaging how well I could have done if I knew this from the beginning. It's easy to miss that, guys. I have been going back to my hotter selling images that haven't gotten many DL's on FT, and reordering the keywords. We'll see if that makes a difference. 2 years worth of images for me isn't huge, as i only have the time to upload about 5-10 new images a week on average.
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it is stated by fotolia's forum moderators that reordering doesn't change anything. you have to get it right before you hit submit
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I wonder if you can provide a link to that post?
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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 :(
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I think, that rather than reorder keys in all of your images - if you just work on the ones with the least views.
Would save a bit of time as the ones that have high views are already being found.
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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. :)
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I wonder if you can provide a link to that post?
I have recently put this in discussion here (see my msg on Feb 20th with the forum quote):
http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php/topic,2409.0.html
Regards,
Adelaide
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FlemishDreams
Can you elaborate on how to best use that link in ur post?
Looks interesting.
The MIZ
Apparently many people use FlemishTagger (http://flemishdreams.com/tag) 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 ;-)
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help says, your script can be downloaded, but I could not find the link on your web site.
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Same thing in Lightroom but I do reorder them manually in FT. It's worth it! Just good business. :)
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.
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it is stated by fotolia's forum moderators that reordering doesn't change anything. you have to get it right before you hit submit
Not sure that's true, but can't quite figure out what. Here is an experiment I tried.
Took one image and searched by four words close to the bottom of the list. It brought up 2 pages but not mine. I move all 4 to the top of the list. Searched using those words in order, same result. I took one of the words out of the search and my image came up first. Not sure what that means.
Another image, searched on 5 words from the bottom of the list, no results. Moved 2 to the top and did the same search, no results. Moved all 5 to the top and did same search. not in the order as in the list, my image came up as only one.
Not sure of how the test helps, other than you can reorder after uploading and it was worth the effort.
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It's definitely strange there. They say that only the first 7 keywords count but I have found some of mine using keywords that aren't in the first 7 and have searched in vain for others using the first 7 keywords.
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I wonder if you can provide a link to that post?
this is the main one, there are a few others as well, with titles 'keywords' etc
http://www.fotolia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=9570
very simply,
first 7 keywords count (although I do have a few images that use words after the 7, and images that dont use within the 7 ???)
changing the order after it has been submitted has no effect as there database is not reindexed. You have to contact support if you want this done. (however they just asked me to supply every image number that is a problem with examples of searches for each image that I felt they should appear within - for 2000 images ??? (I had told them 2000 images - so am rewording my request and asking again)
Images may only be submitted once according to fotolia, so even delete and resubmit is apparently not acceptable - apparently people are being told no on resubmit as it has been on before.
and of course they have tighter standards now, since their competition was announced my acceptance dropped to around 50%. and my last batch which was just after having a complain about the keyword situation I had 2 out of 20 accepted (19 of 20 at 123 and ss, 20 of 20 most other places, images refused for technical quality that istock have accepted???) maybe just coincidence???
basically their view is, get it right first time. (even though when you look at one of your images at the top "It's one of your files, you can index it" this puts you to the edit data screen where you have the reorder keywords. Just another broken bit of the site?)
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- 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.
No I don't have to find a way. Quite honestly, I don't believe there is a way.
I'm satisfied in knowing what I can "DO NOW" At least every image from now on will be ok. Thats all that counts really.