What you're seeing is not iStock randomly rekeywording your images, it's buyers and/or contributors 'correcting' the keywords you used.

Yes but the way I understood was that it then went through the 'wiki' team who are meant to oversee and approve the additions/subtractions from your keywords.

 My own personal experience of this is that the majority of times it works out OK and I've been thankful for some of the suggestions, however amongst others I've had an image of a calculator on a white background whereby someone has suggested the removal of the keyword 'calculator' and it was then removed by the wiki team, and only this week I got a notice telling me that my image titled 'businessman walking a tightrope' (which as you can probably guess is a shot of a man in a suit walking along a piece of rope) had the suggestion of adding the word 'nobody' and again this was approved by the wiki team, even if they didn't look at the image the title alone should surely suggest to even the most uneducated person that the word 'nobody' shouldn't apply.

The conclusion I draw is there are people who suggest the adding and removal of keywords for vindictive reasons, also that on some occassions the wiki team don't even bother checking whether the suggestion is accurate.

There are some who seem to delight in it though. There's one person on this forum - I won't name names - who does it so often that he's earned a special red badge for all his hard work!

I do wiki sometimes, too - but only to madelaide's images. (grin)

Istock should publish two books:

Book 'How to use the right keywods for finding what you need' for buyers and Book 'How to keyword your images' for uploaders ;-)

Did we lose another member to the ban button?

hmm, i was thinking the same thing, but maybe that person just got pissed off and delete the account here. too bad, it's good to be able to shoot the sh#t here, regardless of whether you 're happy with the  response or not.  a good way to pass the time while waiting for your file to download, lol

The following keywords used for this file do not appear to be fully relevant to the subject.

{[ Golf Course (Sports Venue)]}

The thing that bugs me too is if you want to send it to support to get reviewed again you have to wait like a month to hear back from them and you can only do that three times a month.

Of all the photos I have sent to be reviewed again they only ever overturned one once.

All my scout images(all=3 or so) have been accepted after contacting scout.

That is pretty good.