I describe my images as accurately as possible. If one sentence is enough to do that - which in most cases it is - I will not fabricate something just to get more sentences and don't see the point of it. I think the only cases where I have more than just one (short) sentence as title is when I do conceptual photos, because then I usually describe what is in the picture as well as what concept it conveys.

Do you have more than just one sentence just because you can or do you just have one sentence as your Adobe Stock title? (I know it generally offers just one sentence as a suggestion but what has worked for you?)

I recommend you review the Adobe Stock metadata field guide for helpful information: https://adobestock.adobe.com/Metadata-Field-Guide.html

-Mat Hayward

I went back to the guide to re-read it and although there's a ton of good information in there, I don't agree with all of the advice in terms of a contributor who submits to multiple sites but who wants to keyword their information once and embed that in the JPEG/PNG.

Leaving Getty's controlled vocabulary to one side, you can generally cover all the agencies as long as you order things with most important keywords first. As Alamy had a similar approach, it wasn't hard to just get into the habit of thinking about importance (and I do keywords in Photoshop) as you enter them so there's no re-arranging needed.

As far as how buyers think of things - and thus what's the best way to refer to an aspect of the image in keywords - the sites that told you how a buyer searched for the item are very helpful. Shutterstock used to (not sure if they still do) and Dreamstime does. It can also help to do a few searches for what you think are the top one or two keywords and see what comes up. If you're getting images that aren't what you expected, try some search terms until you see results that look like what you're planning to upload.

Sometimes details matter to buyers, so I always include small relevant details if I have slots available towards the end of the list. A recent example from a Dreamstime license is that an image of a kitchen remodel was searched for with wood shims (which were there to adjust for small space variations during installation).

With overhead particularly, I think it's ambiguous and that flat lay is probably a better way to describe a shot from directly overhead. I did some searches for flat lay, overhead and top down view to illustrate. Top down works better than top down view- 259,242 versus just 25,279 but flat lay and overhead are both around 1.4 million results. Quite a bit of overlap, but the differences give you clues.

Overhead can mean something over the subject's head - there's a person looking up at a plane flying overhead in the results - or a ground level view of something with a prominent roof/ceiling, or a high angle view of a group of people in a room, a painter rolling the ceiling above his head, or...

When you do searches by either relevance or downloads, the spam tends to fade away and you get an idea of solid terms for buyers to find content. It can be a good guide when you're unsure of the best term to pick (and tends to be pretty consistent from agency to agency, at least for the very large collections).

SS used to have a tool that told you how often search terms were used over time - for instance you could see when seasonal searches ramped up and compare 2 or three synonyms to see what was used most often in searches. It was incredibly useful, so of course they got rid of it.

DT shows what terms were used to find the images sold. It is often misleading because original search terms do not always reflect a search that clicks on similar images or images from the same port. Sometimes searches are very explicit, but more often they are just one or 2 words.

I do wish the sites did more to limit spam - either intentional or unintentional (for example DT pulls words out of the description and puts them in the keywords and also splits 2 or more word keywords into single words leading to unintentional spam.)

I think the advice to put what is in the image in the keywords starting with the most important words is basic and good advice. It would be useful for the sites to say what people search for when they want isolated or cutout (or whatever the search term is) images. Same for top down, or flat lay, or copyspace or negative space or whatever.