Hello all,

I'm wondering about your two cents on this issue. I've photographed every major city in the USA and tons of smaller ones and many of those have been uploaded to Istock and Getty images. Lately I have noticed that the platform does not recognize many or them and will not even allow a search. For instance, Cannelton, Indiana. The system will not even allow that word to be searched and instead searches for Cannelloni. HUH?

Some on the keyword team have told me that even if they decline to add a word to the keyword system search term recognizable words it is still searchable in title and description. I was happy to hear that, but in my tests, it does not seem to be true.

Other cities, which I have images and video uploaded and approved for do not come up in a search. This effectively means I have been wasting my time uploading anything not in recognizable search terms to Getty/Istock.

The Hopkinsville area has a military base plus a major city in Tennessee close by Clarksville. The combined population of those three areas is over 250,000. Do you think that none of those people need or want any images? I'm dumbfounded. Do any of you care and if so, is there anything we can do?

PS, I care about my partnership with Getty and Istock, I know some of you do not, however, I ask that you be respectful. This is not a bash Getty/Istock post. Instead, it is a call to arm for help and support. This issue if affecting buyers and sellers of images, which I am both.

Thanks, looking forward to your constructive comments meant to further and improve the situation.

https://www.gettyimages.com/videos/hopkinsville-kentucky?assettype=film&family=creative&phrase=hopkinsville%20kentucky&sort=mostpopular&license=rf%2Crr

Does not work....search term is in both fields.

Try Elizabethtown.....check out those results, OMG. Yet I have images accepted over 6 months ago customers are being fed almost no relevant images.

I made some decent money on iStock 10-20 years ago with cities, travel, tourism, landmark, location, type photos. This issue of the keywords and Controlled Vocabulary is but just one bullet killing such sales. I'm under the further impression iStock doesn't really want this kind of work in their collection. Over the years there have also been some concerns with logos and trademarked names in skyline shots - another changing bullet in their upload checks. Lifestyle, business, commercial, and such, is now desired by iS. They think location images would be better in some other Getty collections - but I'm not a Getty contributor (other than some past work that iS sent up the chain). So now I submit this kind of work, rights-managed, image exclusive, editorial, to another agency.

The issue is Getty's controlled vocabulary, which iStock uses.

There is a process for requesting additions to the vocabulary, but even in the past that was a slow thing to get done. Again, in the past, you could put in an unknown (to the CV) keyword and it would permit it although a search had to be done in quotes for it to be found. I recently started uploading to iStock again and found that accepted images with unknown terms (place names in my case as in yours) had those terms flagged:

"Keyword in red is not found. Click for suggestions, remove, or recommend a new keyword."

I had used DeepMeta to disambiguate keywords into CV-speak and while it allowed me to upload with an unknown term, there were no useful suggestions and I didn't want to go through the process of adding hundreds of placenames.

So general location information - such as California or Oregon or or Haystack Rock or Pacific Northwest - were OK but not Arch Cape, Hug Point or other town or attraction names.

If you have stamina and time, request addition of the keywords to the CV. If not, put in state names or anything else that is already there (Deep Meta will let you know up front what you can use because you can't change anything after acceptance yourself - that'd be another support ticket)

I think it's mad, but it's been mad for so long that I wouldn't expect changes in my lifetime

Getty's controlled vocabulary is deeply flawed.  Almost governmental in its stupidity.  Kinda shocking they don't realize it. 

Their vocabulary system is the reason why I stopped uploading there years ago.
I now simply claim that a large part of my images sells at other agencies via an individual and good keywording. Since that is not possible here, it explains why I have the fewest sales here with maximum effort during upload.
 
More than half of my keywords were usually not in the iStock system and it always cost a lot of time to find out that iStock also offers no reasonable alternatives.
 
Decided then that the two of us don't fit together.
I only say "nautical vessel" 

I haven't uploaded there in years and years, but I remember "Newport" wasn't allowed - so my photos of Newport Rhode Island couldn't be uploaded. I wrote to them, but never heard back.

Getty has some of my images from 500px and I'm amazed when they sell since Getty did their own keywording and most have none of the obvious/important keywords. Many of them sell frequently on Alamy.

I have photos of some small towns that do very well elsewhere - especially on Alamy. Maybe you want to try there. They are known for out of the way places. Give it a try - good luck!

  However, I do not know the process on getting certain words and locations added

Contact Us > File Editing > Recommend a new keyword

That's how to suggest a new keyword. They may or may not implement the change, partly dependent on whether it's likely to be submitted or searched for often. For example, they almost certainly wouldn't include my very small, nondescript town.