That would be a too much big step foward. Let's start by sub categories. Because Fotolia would never recover from a change like this. They put so much time in their category system

I think on most sites you are allowed to choose just one category if you want, which isn't too time consuming. I often like seeing what are the best selling or the latest photos in a category and I'm sure there are buyers who do this too.

edit: changed the word considering to consuming. My English is going to the dogs :-)

Quote from: Vonkara on January 13, 2010, 21:56

...Fotolia would never recover from a change like this. They put so much time in their category system

And I put so much time into categorizing for Fototlia, for so few sales. And they send me these breathless, excited emails telling me that a Premier Subscriber has just purchased one of my photos, size XL, and I get 25 cents.

There is an option to turn the emails off.   But it seems you should turn Fotolia off instead;)

Are they really of no use? It really takes a loooong time to categorize all those pictures. If at least categories were the same for all agencies and we could store it with the IPTC data...

I guess most people just type keywords and use categories only in special cases were too many nonsense results show up that fall into another category, or when one concept may mean two different things so that it can be filtered with categories.

123RF has no categories.

Not much seems to change at these sites with regard to upload processes.  I think they spend all their time in meetings, coming up with ever-more-complicated subscription plans.

I think it was Achilles some time ago that said that categories do attract some buyers. He claimed to have data to sustain that position. The majority of my sales on DT is by the keyword n/a. That means the buyer found the image by visual search in similars, or by browsing categories.

1. Waste of time for contributors but good way to organize files for agencies.
2.There are customers who like to browse so somebody has to do it:
 - contributors - free for agency
 - paid employee who is reviewing images initially - it will slow process even more
 - program which can analyze keywords and description and put image into category automatically - programmers needs to be hired to write it.

Guess which option is chosen :-)

I'm looking at my sales on DT .. I'm just assuming that a N/A in the keyword field means the buyer did not do a search and either browsed to the image from either a category or public lightbox. I'm just guessing .. can anybody verify this?

Anyway, if the N/A is a non-search result then I personally see something like maybe roughly 30-40% sales from category browsing. If this rough percentage is similar on the rest of the Big 6 then yeah that adds up to a huge chunk of my income being generated through categories and would definitely be worth the time.

I do think there should be a standardized category system so that all us photographers could implement it into our IPTC workflows. However, it's not something an agency can just implement on their own as a contributor benefit. All of the agencies would have to unite and develop the system together. Private corporations just can't be expected to do something like that when there is nothing in it for them ... especially when it would honestly only affect a small handfull of contributors with heavy workflows ... but man it would be cool.

I think N/A is search by catagory because there are alot of my older images sold under that so it wouldn't be by a search of new images and there were four older images that are similiar in content that all have N/A, so I would assume that would be buy catogory

It's in German, but maybe with Google Translate it is understandable:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2010/01/13/kategorien-in-bildagenturen-abschaffen-oder-andern/&twu=1

I'm amazed, Google Translation seems to have improved a lot in recent years!! (anyway the German version is nicer to read, thanks for your article)