A recent discussion triggered my interest about categories.
Bigstock has the "Estimated guess".....

Who is actually checking those categories and correcting them if needed... just a simple yes or no.

Patrick.

yes

Yes

I did when I uploaded, and I did also in CanStockPhoto.  Sometimes their guesses are perfect, sometimes totally off.

Yes

Yes

I do but don't know why.  I guess we are all programmed to "follow instructions."   

I am - I guess I'm just paranoid about someone thinking I'm spamming my content into categories that don't match the theme of the image.

yes

I don't but with good reason, I've never held the belief that categories serve any useful purpose other than assisting the sites own administration, now as much as I love BigStock (Dawn and Tim have always been very straight speaking and helpful, and the reviewers very fair) they don't have the volume of sales to justify me spending the time correcting what the site clearly doesn't see as important itself, because if they did think it was important they'd sort it out.

Quote from: RT on February 24, 2010, 19:38
I don't but with good reason, I've never held the belief that categories serve any useful purpose other than assisting the sites own administration, now as much as I love BigStock (Dawn and Tim have always been very straight speaking and helpful, and the reviewers very fair) they don't have the volume of sales to justify me spending the time correcting what the site clearly doesn't see as important itself, because if they did think it was important they'd sort it out.

Perhaps you aren't getting the sales volume at BigStock because your images aren't categorized correctly. There are plenty of people that do very well there.

Quote from: Norebbo on February 25, 2010, 04:03
Perhaps you aren't getting the sales volume at BigStock because your images aren't categorized correctly. There are plenty of people that do very well there.

Well that all depends of what your definition of 'very well' is, judging on the performance figures on the right here and speaking to some other contributors that are around the same level of me in microstock I haven't heard of anyone who'd say they're doing very well on BigStock, it's a nice site and I'll continue to upload there.

I do check them and correct them, as I've had images come back with the message "please take a few moments to check and correct categories". However I dont believe they have any value unless you are lucky enough to be on the first few pages on the category listing (of course there is no real way to know).