Hello,
Can anyone give me some more information on the Istock Keyword Refine ?

1. Is it necessary to do it?
2. If you have many images with similar keywords, can you somehow copy the refine options from one image to another?
3. Is there anyway to make this process less time consuming?


thanks

Oh, lord! What is "keyword refine"? Is this just the old system of having to select terms from their approved vocabulary lists or is it some new rubbish that they expect us to do? (As you can tell, I'm not paying much attention to what they are doing over there).

Some of us have a portfolio there, but aren't actively uploading, though I can't remember if BT is in that category.

I haven't uploaded anything for at least a year and scarcely anything for two or three years but I do have something like 6,000 images there.
My concern is not over uploading but over whether they are expecting us to go and do something to thousands of old files, the way they did when they brought in disambiguation (I still have several hundred files that were never disambiguated). I have seen my sales there collapse since the wonderful revamp in January, so I thought perhaps they were punishing people who didn't spend solid months redisambiguating everything in the hope of picking up an extra $20 a month.

A few years back, they said that undisambiguated words weren't to show up in search. I don't know if that ever happened, given their lack of tech abilities, but what I noticed happening was that undisambiguated words polluted all other meanings of a word, e.g. 'orange' things polluted searches on orange (fruit), or if there were several instances of a placename, unDAd files showed up in all of them.

Nowadays, it is again supposed to be that undisambiguated words don't show.
What I'm finding (but at least one other claims not to be finding) is that the old 'for your own use' terms are now unfindable, confirmed by Team Keywords and, eventually, by Support. What I'm supposed to do is find all of my unsearchable terms and put them into a form to request new keywords. When they're added, I'm then supposed to contact Suppport and ask them to make these terms 'live' on my pics.

I uploaded a lot of files of new species early last year (sic, 2016) and asked for their names to be added to the CV, as per their instructions, and nothing happened. Then there was a note by admin in the forums which said that Team Keywords had looked at all of the requests and added those they wanted to add. (They were supposed to let us know.) I posted a question to ask if those which were requested but not wanted could be removed from the collection as they were unfindable, but the very next day they changed the forums around totally and my question has either been disappeared in the new forum or I haven't been able to find it.

That, hugely falling sales and vastly falling average rpd (now below $2 for me), together with all the changes meaning one day they ask for some sorts of files, then they don't take them and remove any in their system makes the whole thing far too unpredictable for me to upload any more there unless things change a lot.

Nowadays, it is again supposed to be that undisambiguated words don't show.

That could explain the collapse in my sales. Like you, a lot of my keywords are things (places, species) that iStock's never heard of and I couldn't be bothered to send endless suggestions (they could, after all, just copy the entire index of The Times Atlas of the World if they had any intention of making the geographical tags comprehensive) so many of mine main keywords probably don't produce results any more.

To compound the stupidity, I once sent a suggestion that something - I think it was Akrotiri, Crete - should be added as it was a peninsula north of Chania, and they did add it... but they deleted Akrotiri, Cyprus (which is the site of a British military base) at the same time.  As for the number of White Mountains there are in the world, most of which iStock knows nothing about....