Josh

A good set of questions, and one that I grapple with as I upload images to many sites. As far as I know, there are no sites that require less than 50 keywords, but different sites handle compound keywords differently - so if I put thailand,royal palace,cambodia in my keywords, that counts as three on most sites, but sometimes I find that sites will accept these as three if the total is less than 50, but if I've made a mistake and added 52 keywords in total, the site suddenly disassembles my compound keywords and I have to remove quite a few to get back to 50. I'm not 100% sure if Photodune does that, but that can be pretty annoying.

I now try very hard to only submit 50 keywords (with my compound ones counting as one), and so it is only when I make a mistake that I have to remove them. In that case, I would much prefer to remove the ones that I think are on the edge of being useful. A count of remaining keywords would be great, as it is trial and error at the moment on Photodune. Removing them automatically would not work for me as I use Lightroom to keyword my images and that always sorts them alphabetically, so my most important keyword may be at the end. I've also found a neat plugin for Lightroom that counts my keywords (described it here: http://www.backyardsilver.com/2012/07/how-to-count-the-number-of-keywords-in-lightroom/), so I should now be much better organized.

So my suggestion - put a count of keywords over 50, don't disaggregate compound keywords, and let me choose which ones to delete.

Steve

set the default to automatically trim to first 50

an option to manually edit the tags would be nice but secondary

I think it's important to let the contributor choose, and helpful to have the option to automatically take the first 50.

I think if you do let the contributor choose, you need to keep the keyword count updated as items are deleted - so there's no guessing about how many more to remove.

I don't know how your search works with stems and plurals, but if you automatically find items keyworded "duck" if the searcher enters "ducks" and color/colour, painted/paint, etc. then you could really help by handling removal of redundant keywords. Shutterstock does this (they have a feedback loop where they tell you about misspellings and redundant words). That would help get the total count down if people have lots of words just to handle the variations in US/UK english and words with a common stem.

set the default to automatically trim to first 50

an option to manually edit the tags would be nice but secondary

Please don't do this!
Few people put their keywords in order of priority as most agencies don't require it and just order the words alphabetically.
I can see why you would want the advantage if you are one of the few who do but it will make your agency's search a total mess.