I recently submitted a batch of photos of street food at vendors in a night market in Taiwan. IS accepted them but excluded the following keywords:
{[Traditional Culture, Food, � Market (Retail Place), � Night Market, � Market Stall (Market), Street, street food, Tourist, Traditional Culture, Market Vendor (Vendor), Vendor (Retail Occupation)]}
I know the general rule for accurate keywording is to keyword only what you can see in the photo, but some sites have mentioned it is important to include information about location, etc if it is relevant to the picture. Pretty much ALL relevant keywords have been removed as well as the context. But irrelevant keywords like "Christmas" (An oversight on my part when copying from keyword generator) have been left in.
Is it worthwhile pointing this out to IS? And if so, is it possible to do it without submitting a ticket for each photo?
Here is an example of one of the photos:
http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/street-food-at-a-night-market-in-taipei-54320682

Like Dify and Joe say, this is a score draw. You had some keywords which definitely didn't belong in that file, and some, like 'food', which should definitely be there.
Arguably, 'cooking' which was left in, shouldn't be there, as there is no actual cooking going on.

From your point of view, you have to think from a buyer's perspective. If they searched for 'tourist' or 'vendor', (or 'cooking') would you want to see that file?

OTOH, street food, market stall and arguably some of the others should not have been removed.

I'm surprised that they removed all of those for you as opposed to rejecting the file and having you correct them. Inspectors must be bored.

Most likely they are trying to get their inventory up to compared in numbers with Shutter thus will not reject so easy as in the past...

I agree with Joe that the CV is too limiting to allow accurate keywording.

More than that, it seems to me like an over-ambitious and ultimately inelegant and clunky idea from another era. Over engineered and ultimately neither efficient nor effective. As if all of language could somehow be streamlined and simplified. And it must surely eat resources.

The CV is often rubbish on concepts. Take eg something like 'self service' which is obviously a top 10 hot business trend today. Try finding conceptual images to represent this conceptually on iStock and you are stuck with images of food counters. Because someone has narrowed down the meaning of self-service such that it relates only to food.

This is one simple example of how the CV has over time reduced the value of the iStock collection by reducing the usefulness of the metadata. 

trying to streamline language is a gargantuan task

In many cases there would surely be difficult to resolve [many]>-<[many] and recursive relationships within meanings. It may also take an extra layer of overheads to reverse translate search queries into their CV relationships. I wonder whether this sometimes contributes to the slowness of the site.

Possibly the CV is a legacy of a different business - designed for a site with many fewer images which were keyworded by the bureau. In those days it would have perhaps been a more manageable prospect.

Ultimately the CV seems to reduce meaning. I think it therefore makes their results in some cases inevitably less niched and less specific - which would especially be a potential issue with respect to new trends which they cannot know. In some ways that seems to undermine the benefits of user generated submissions.

They are removing all the important keywords - no sense uploading there anymore.

Quote from: wordplanet on December 29, 2014, 01:04

It's a big part of why I have so few images there - I had travel images from Newport Rhode Island that I could not upload because "Newport" is a forbidden term and was constantly rejected, and my ticket to scout went nowhere. I have images from Muir Woods in California where the trees are not properly identified because they narrowed my choices. Again, my suggestions for additions to the controlled vocabulary were ignored.

It's so time consuming and annoying to upload there though the software plug in helps.

Fun Fact:

It takes just as much time to post here to whine and complain and improve nothing at all and not have your images show up on a search as it does to suggest keywords of which they most likely will approve then add to their CV to have your images found and make more sales.

I suggest keywords whenever this happens to me, and almost 100% of the time they add the keyword to the CV.

So quite whining here and do something constructive and suggest a keyword "Newport - Rhode Island" with this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport,_Rhode_Island and I am 100% certain it will be added, then your images will be found.

"Newport - Rhode Island" is already in the CV

It takes just as much time to post here to whine and complain and improve nothing at all and not have your images show up on a search as it does to suggest keywords of which they most likely will approve then add to their CV to have your images found and make more sales.

1. A surprising number of people are banned from there. I have no idea if the OP is a member of the Club.
2. They might or might not add them to the CV. Sometimes the reason for not adding them are incomprehensible, or not given.
3. You'll need to remind me what a sale is. I haven't had one since the 23rd. And I'm by no means the only one.

Quote from: shudderstok on December 29, 2014, 10:57

Quote from: wordplanet on December 29, 2014, 01:04

It's a big part of why I have so few images there - I had travel images from Newport Rhode Island that I could not upload because "Newport" is a forbidden term and was constantly rejected, and my ticket to scout went nowhere. I have images from Muir Woods in California where the trees are not properly identified because they narrowed my choices. Again, my suggestions for additions to the controlled vocabulary were ignored.

It's so time consuming and annoying to upload there though the software plug in helps.

Fun Fact:

It takes just as much time to post here to whine and complain and improve nothing at all and not have your images show up on a search as it does to suggest keywords of which they most likely will approve then add to their CV to have your images found and make more sales.

I suggest keywords whenever this happens to me, and almost 100% of the time they add the keyword to the CV.

So quite whining here and do something constructive and suggest a keyword "Newport - Rhode Island" with this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport,_Rhode_Island and I am 100% certain it will be added, then your images will be found.

"Newport - Rhode Island" is already in the CV

It's been so long since I've uploaded there. Good to know, I'll try again. Thanks!

Vis a vis the non-CV keyword bug I mentioned here, inter alia:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/third-final-warning-unacceptable-keyword-practices/msg401608/#msg401608
Someone there must read the group, as a couple of weeks later, I noticed on my file that Moussier's Redstart (but not Phoenicurus moussieri) was now in the CV. In my files' keywords, these words had turned black.
BUT - and this is important - my files were still unfindable on a search for "Moussier's Redstart", even though when typing it into the keyword box I was offered it as I typed.
I had to remove the word from my keywords and re-insert it before the files would show up. (I did them a week apart, experimentally.)

However, the larger problem has not been tackled.
I added the nonsense keyword 'spingle' and keyword phrase 'spingle plonk' to one of my files on Dec 29th.
Whereas previously these would have been blue, and alerted me to the fact that they were unsearchable, now they went black while keywording.
However, neither entity is searchable.

My point about the Moussier's Redstart was merely illustrative of a sitewide non-CV keywording bug.
So now:
If you have a non-CV word in your keywords which hadn't been added by someone 'for their own use', it's unfindable.
But instead of being blue as before, drawing your attention to that issue so that you can decide what to do (i.e. if you have a picture of a Spingle Plonk, is there any point in even having it on iStock if it will never be seen), it's now black, which suggests it's at least there 'for your own use'.
And:
If a non-CV word is added sometime after you uploaded a file with that term and you don't know it's been added, your keyword is still unsearchable until you delete the keyword and add it again.