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Author Topic: death to categories  (Read 6293 times)

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« on: January 13, 2010, 21:29 »
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All microstocks - and especially IS - should immediately and unconditionally drop all use of categories.   They're a huge waste of time.  Few buyers use them.  All sets of predefined categories, on all microstocks that use them, are laughably limited and sadly out-of-date.  The small returns we get on these photos in no way justify the time spent trying to categorize them.  It's just one more "because we can" requirement, one more pointless hoop to jump through.  Death to categories, everywhere, now.

Discuss.



vonkara

« Reply #1 on: January 13, 2010, 21:56 »
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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

« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2010, 21:59 »
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...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.


« Reply #3 on: January 14, 2010, 01:20 »
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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 :-)
« Last Edit: January 14, 2010, 02:22 by Komar »

« Reply #4 on: January 14, 2010, 02:15 »
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I quite agree that categories are waste of time. Most of the time when a person is looking for a particular type of photos, he would just search for the keywords. Personally I think the use of categories is mainly more for the stock agency than the customers.

« Reply #5 on: January 14, 2010, 05:58 »
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...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;)

« Reply #6 on: January 14, 2010, 09:04 »
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FYI, You do not have to pick categories at Fotolia in order to submit images.  I have been skipping catagories lately.  It really speeds things up.

eyeCatchLight

  • Imagination is more important than knowledge.
« Reply #7 on: January 14, 2010, 11:07 »
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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.

« Reply #8 on: January 14, 2010, 17:19 »
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Categories were a waste of time and a pain when I started in micro 5+ years ago. I've read nothing since to change that opinion.
Can you image Google requiring you to type in a category every time you wanted to find something? Yet we are required by many sites to continue this lunacy with every upload. What a waste.

« Reply #9 on: January 14, 2010, 17:25 »
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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.

lisafx

« Reply #10 on: January 14, 2010, 17:50 »
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I've seen a lot of changes at most of the sites regarding the upload process.  Some good, some not-so-good. 


« Reply #11 on: January 14, 2010, 17:52 »
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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.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2010, 17:54 by FD-amateur »

« Reply #12 on: January 14, 2010, 17:57 »
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Ditto: categories are a waste of time.
If I were a buyer I would only type the keywords of the images I'm looking for, without wasting my time searching in silly categories.

Let's hope something changes...

« Reply #13 on: January 14, 2010, 18:07 »
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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 :-)

« Reply #14 on: January 15, 2010, 02:08 »
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but keywords organize just as effectively -- categories are only an efficient organizer if all images are categorized the same way. 

another problem is the categories are so broad that the result is meaningless -- who's going to look at 'nature' or 'architecture' to find what they need?

i've skipped categories wherever possible - they're an enormous waste of time -- if you can submit w/o you upload and your job is done - even if it's only 1 click, there's stll the waiting time even w a fast connection

bigstock's taken a step backwards with their 'guesstimates' -- these are worthless since they do an "OR' search of the keywords, resulting in categories that need to be blanked out or changed.  any suggested categories should apply to ALL the images selected.

s

« Reply #15 on: January 15, 2010, 11:56 »
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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. :)

eyeCatchLight

  • Imagination is more important than knowledge.
« Reply #16 on: January 15, 2010, 12:00 »
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yeah, i also have some of those N/As... i guess they might also happen when buyers look for the newly uploaded images. certainly also just from browsing.


donding

  • Think before you speak
« Reply #17 on: January 15, 2010, 12:13 »
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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

fotorob

  • Professional stock content producer
« Reply #18 on: January 15, 2010, 12:22 »
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I just posted an article in my blog two days ago where I rallyed for the abolishion of categories as well.

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

Bye, Robert

eyeCatchLight

  • Imagination is more important than knowledge.
« Reply #19 on: January 16, 2010, 09:17 »
0

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)


 

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