shutterstock now requires 5 word minimum for all descriptions?

dumb idea

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 05:47
shutterstock now requires 5 word minimum for all descriptions?

dumb idea

Given how many photos there are on the site it makes sense to me to be honest.

Why would you ever want to use less then five?!

You should sue them. As there's no law in the world that states that there must be a minimum of five keywords, it therefore stands to reason that it's illegal to enforce a five keyword minimum. I would start a class action law suit or maybe report them to Interpol.

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 05:47
shutterstock now requires 5 word minimum for all descriptions?

dumb idea

Why is it dumb? Its a description describing what is in the image.

5 words is a reasonable limit and probably helps stop image thieves who use one or two words like "Beautiful Nature" etc.

I really like this idea.

it is a dumb idea because no one reads the description when making a decision to purchase an image.

it might not be a big deal for people with small portfolios, but when you have 60,000 photos it is a big deal when you have to go back and retitle 10,000 photos just to comply with a requirement that has no effect on sales.

I have had to do this for bigstock and all it does it lead to stupid titles. "smiling young girl" becomes "smiling young girl with long hair" which has no impact on someone's desire to buy the image. it is just a waste of time.

these companies should be making it easier for people to contribute, not harder.

to say you like this idea is just stupid. why shouldn't someone have the right to make a title with 4 words? seriously you think it is a great idea to force everyone else to increase their title length, when they can do it voluntarily anyway? you are opposed to 4 word titles for other contributors?

If I got it right, best chances are using all title, description and keyword available space or word count to get maximum possibilities?

But sometimes seems quite meaningless. (ok, still a newbie, maybe wrong...)

A  red rose on pot isolated
remains a red rose on pot isolated
even if it is described or tagged from beautiful to awesome to "planted by God's hand itself"

further, keywords seem to mislead if not put in a phrase of a kind,
how about clients looking for Adrenaline, Samurai, Kashmir, Vancouver, Dublin or ....Hope for Humanity!
(random googled source of roses names https://www.stylecraze.com/articles/most-beautiful-red-roses)

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 09:33
it is a dumb idea because no one reads the description when making a decision to purchase an image.

it might not be a big deal for people with small portfolios, but when you have 60,000 photos it is a big deal when you have to go back and retitle 10,000 photos just to comply with a requirement that has no effect on sales.

I have had to do this for bigstock and all it does it lead to stupid titles. "smiling young girl" becomes "smiling young girl with long hair" which has no impact on someone's desire to buy the image. it is just a waste of time.

these companies should be making it easier for people to contribute, not harder.

to say you like this idea is just stupid. why shouldn't someone have the right to make a title with 4 words? seriously you think it is a great idea to force everyone else to increase their title length, when they can do it voluntarily anyway? you are opposed to 4 word titles for other contributors?

what if somebody searches for "girl with long hair"? It will find the "smiling young girl with long hair" photo/video but not the "smiling young girl".

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 09:33
it is a dumb idea because no one reads the description when making a decision to purchase an image.

it might not be a big deal for people with small portfolios, but when you have 60,000 photos it is a big deal when you have to go back and retitle 10,000 photos just to comply with a requirement that has no effect on sales.

I have had to do this for bigstock and all it does it lead to stupid titles. "smiling young girl" becomes "smiling young girl with long hair" which has no impact on someone's desire to buy the image. it is just a waste of time.

these companies should be making it easier for people to contribute, not harder.

to say you like this idea is just stupid. why shouldn't someone have the right to make a title with 4 words? seriously you think it is a great idea to force everyone else to increase their title length, when they can do it voluntarily anyway? you are opposed to 4 word titles for other contributors?

It's not about influencing buyers to purchase because they're reading the description. It's about avoiding similar descriptions in bulk (from the same or from different contributors) which can impact your ranking negatively in the search ranking, as it will consider these files to be duplicate if most of the keywords match.

Unique content sells, but with unique descriptions it sells way better.

Also, 'Smiling young girl' is a title, not a description, and might not be recognized as a sentence, rather a list of keywords.

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 09:33
it is a dumb idea because no one reads the description when making a decision to purchase an image.
...SNIP..

I don't think that is true, even among commercial buyers, and certainly not among editorial buyers.

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 09:33
it is a dumb idea because no one reads the description when making a decision to purchase an image.

it might not be a big deal for people with small portfolios, but when you have 60,000 photos it is a big deal when you have to go back and retitle 10,000 photos just to comply with a requirement that has no effect on sales.

I have had to do this for bigstock and all it does it lead to stupid titles. "smiling young girl" becomes "smiling young girl with long hair" which has no impact on someone's desire to buy the image. it is just a waste of time.

these companies should be making it easier for people to contribute, not harder.

to say you like this idea is just stupid. why shouldn't someone have the right to make a title with 4 words? seriously you think it is a great idea to force everyone else to increase their title length, when they can do it voluntarily anyway? you are opposed to 4 word titles for other contributors?

The harder the sites make it to submit thousands of generic similars the better. If you can't be bothered to caption them properly then they are probably not worth much. No one has any "right" to submit images anywhere.

If it helps stop bulk upload of poorly titled and keyworded images I'm all in.

I suspect it is to help their "world class industry leading machine learning AI" work better.

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 05:47
shutterstock now requires 5 word minimum for all descriptions?

dumb idea

Minor update... you like it or not, even 5 is short description...

A lot of other places already required 7 word descriptions, so it was already a thing.

Good idea. Descriptions are used in searches, and adding relevant words in your descriptive sentence(s) gives you additional keywords if you hit the max of 50.

Plus, descriptions get placed in the page's title, which is good for search engine indexing.

I hardly think this new minimum should cause anyone any grief.

I usually never have to have 5 words in the title. I just get a bit creative and keep it short and to the point. 

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 09:33
it is a dumb idea because no one reads the description when making a decision to purchase an image.

it might not be a big deal for people with small portfolios, but when you have 60,000 photos it is a big deal when you have to go back and retitle 10,000 photos just to comply with a requirement that has no effect on sales.

I have had to do this for bigstock and all it does it lead to stupid titles. "smiling young girl" becomes "smiling young girl with long hair" which has no impact on someone's desire to buy the image. it is just a waste of time.

these companies should be making it easier for people to contribute, not harder.

to say you like this idea is just stupid. why shouldn't someone have the right to make a title with 4 words? seriously you think it is a great idea to force everyone else to increase their title length, when they can do it voluntarily anyway? you are opposed to 4 word titles for other contributors?

are u saying they are Insisting u re-title 10,000 +  images that u already have with them ??  Surely not !?

Quote from: Stu49 on May 03, 2019, 23:15
are u saying they are Insisting u re-title 10,000 +  images that u already have with them ??  Surely not !?

Surely not

Quote from: ODesigns on May 03, 2019, 21:58
Good idea. Descriptions are used in searches, and adding relevant words in your descriptive sentence(s) gives you additional keywords if you hit the max of 50.

Plus, descriptions get placed in the page's title, which is good for search engine indexing.

I hardly think this new minimum should cause anyone any grief.

It's a truly stupid idea because it doesn't address the real problem, assuming the real problem is poor titles.

I write good titles as well as good descriptions; SS ignores the title and grabs the description and it's always more than 5 words.

A rule that makes "Thunder engineering tasty screwdriver elephant" OK but "Granny Smith Apple" not OK is a waste of time and energy for them to enforce.

Why would you name a tasty-looking, elephant-shaped screwdriver (surrounded by thunder)... 'granny smith apple'?! You need to work on your keywording skills!

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 09:33
it is a dumb idea because no one reads the description when making a decision to purchase an image.

it might not be a big deal for people with small portfolios, but when you have 60,000 photos it is a big deal when you have to go back and retitle 10,000 photos just to comply with a requirement that has no effect on sales.

I have had to do this for bigstock and all it does it lead to stupid titles. "smiling young girl" becomes "smiling young girl with long hair" which has no impact on someone's desire to buy the image. it is just a waste of time.

these companies should be making it easier for people to contribute, not harder.

to say you like this idea is just stupid. why shouldn't someone have the right to make a title with 4 words? seriously you think it is a great idea to force everyone else to increase their title length, when they can do it voluntarily anyway? you are opposed to 4 word titles for other contributors?

Enough of the insults you are just being rude.

As to being stupid well anyone with any sense would add titles and proper descriptions whilst adding keywords during processing so its no hardship.

I have the sense to realize that a good description added in the metadata is no big hardship.

Plus other agencies such as Alamy as well as Shutterstock actually use the description in the search parameters. 

How do you know buyers don't read descriptions??? Did you do some real research?  I very much doubt that.

So if you are too lazy or are too stupid to add properly worded descriptions in your metadata  carry on your own sweet way

I may be wrong here, but the description is the only thing visible to standard search engines like Google or Bing, and since most bog standard search tools are not IPTC aware, doesn't this make the images more visible to more searches?  Maybe not for pros, but for the greater unwashed.  In that case, maybe it's not such a dumb idea.

Quote from: unnonimus on May 03, 2019, 09:33
it is a dumb idea because no one reads the description when making a decision to purchase an image.

it might not be a big deal for people with small portfolios, but when you have 60,000 photos it is a big deal when you have to go back and retitle 10,000 photos just to comply with a requirement that has no effect on sales.

I have had to do this for bigstock and all it does it lead to stupid titles. "smiling young girl" becomes "smiling young girl with long hair" which has no impact on someone's desire to buy the image. it is just a waste of time.

these companies should be making it easier for people to contribute, not harder.

to say you like this idea is just stupid. why shouldn't someone have the right to make a title with 4 words? seriously you think it is a great idea to force everyone else to increase their title length, when they can do it voluntarily anyway? you are opposed to 4 word titles for other contributors?

Are they saying you have to go back and re-"description" images that are already uploaded?

Quote from: steviejto on May 15, 2019, 16:29
I may be wrong here, but the description is the only thing visible to standard search engines like Google or Bing

No idea on pictures, ranking or SEO in general.

But from (uploaded) filename, to text to description to keywords, everything seems to be important to a certain point. Here is an example from Google staff twitting.

https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/849532855264956419

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on May 04, 2019, 02:11

Quote from: ODesigns on May 03, 2019, 21:58
Good idea. Descriptions are used in searches, and adding relevant words in your descriptive sentence(s) gives you additional keywords if you hit the max of 50.

Plus, descriptions get placed in the page's title, which is good for search engine indexing.

I hardly think this new minimum should cause anyone any grief.

It's a truly stupid idea because it doesn't address the real problem, assuming the real problem is poor titles.

I write good titles as well as good descriptions; SS ignores the title and grabs the description and it's always more than 5 words.

A rule that makes "Thunder engineering tasty screwdriver elephant" OK but "Granny Smith Apple" not OK is a waste of time and energy for them to enforce.

Agree.