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Messages - ShadySue
15126
« on: May 08, 2010, 17:43 »
"Team Metadata"? Huh?
Why can't IS just be a straightforward business instead of ... never mind. Obviously some people there enjoy all these games.
Seriously, though, if you have issues with keywording at iStock, wouldn't it make more sense to spend your time posting on iStock's keywording forum, which was set up especially for that purpose, than posting here, where you can vent, but can't achieve anything useful, like getting your keywords reinstated if appropriate or at least getting an explanation of why you're not getting them reinstated (and even then, you still have recourse to Scout). Your shout, of course. ;-)
15127
« on: May 08, 2010, 15:28 »
Ok who are these "emyerson or ducksandwich" guys and how is a contributor supposed to know about them?
They're the members of Team Metadata who post most often on the Keywords forum, which is the place to hang out if you're having keywording issues.
15128
« on: May 08, 2010, 05:00 »
p.s. i feel your pain on the keyword rejection... we have all suffered that one. I had a picture of the mountain Half Dome in Yosemite Natn'l Park... it was rejected because the words half dome were not relevant.
I agree it's really annoying when that happens, but on a case as clear-cut as this, you can sitemail emyerson or ducksandwich directly to ask for it to be reinstated (much quicker than Scout). With less clear-cut examples, you can post to the keywords forum - Ethan and Duck often look into threads there anyway. You have to remember that inspectors are from all over the world, and although Half Dome might be iconic for Americans, it may be unheard of elsewhere. Many of the inspectors are mainly studio workers, with no interest in landscape photography. I'm sure I'd never have heard of Half Dome if it weren't for reading Ansel Adams books.
15129
« on: May 07, 2010, 17:22 »
I recommend that you don't mix license types. i.e. if you have something for sale as RF on one site do not sell it under a RM license on Alamy.
Thank you RT for good information!
Also, can you explain to us from your experience, why not to mix license types, they are all non-exclusive ?
If you have sold an image even once as RF, you have no control over what it can be used for (aside from prohibited uses). Therefore that image would not be able to be sold with the more lucrative rights managed licence for exclusive use in a particular sector, geographical area or time span, as you can't guarantee the use of the RF purchaser. So for example, not knowing what the RF user was going to use the image for, you couldn't guarantee that someone could have e.g. exclusive use of an image on a calendar front in the US and Canada for the year 2011. If the RM was just a purchase to use the image with no exclusivity requested, it wouldn't be so much of an issue. Some RM companies won't allow it in any case.
15130
« on: May 05, 2010, 17:53 »
I still can't figure out by which criteria they are picking pictures from my port for ThinkStock. I've been clicking this PP checkbox constantly during upload, but none of my newer images(last two months) shows up at ThinkStock.
There's a thread about it on the iStock Help forum: http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=190961&page=1.
15131
« on: May 05, 2010, 17:34 »
In the past I sent Jordan many suggestions, with dictionary definitions. Never saw any of them included, then stopped bothering.
I don't pretend to understand why some suggestions can be implemented immediately and other can take months or years. It took years for me to get my current home county in the CV - previously they only had Strathclyde, which only existed for 22 years and was abolished in 1996! Meanwhile my county existed before, during and after the Strathclyde fiasco. Ayrshire mapped only to Ayrshire Cattle (so unlike most other counties, I couldn't even add it 'for my own use')! For a while, I couldn't understand why a search on Bustard (a group of species of birds) had loads of photos of water drops, then I discovered the Polish for bustard is 'drop', and it was causing the CV to seize. That's mostly been sorted now. :-) Off to wiki the few remaining non-Bustards. ;-)
15132
« on: May 05, 2010, 17:01 »
It's not down to 'technology', it's just a matter of them dedicating the manpower to provide adequate choices for words that have multiple meanings. I get the impression it has largely been left as it is rather than someone continually refining it.
I agree^^. When the CV was first implemented there were lots of changes and improvements made on a regular basis. Jordan (Keywords) was available to refine the CV according to contributor suggestions.
Does he even still work for Istock? The last activity on his account appears to be in 2007.
And AFAIK nobody else has stepped into the role of refining the CV. It is still so far from perfect - there ought to be somebody in charge of continuously improving it.
The last I heard, Jordan/Keywords still works in Team Metadata, but he doesn't reply to emails and doesn't post on the forums. That part of the job has devolved to David/Ducksandwich.
15133
« on: May 05, 2010, 16:51 »
Thanks ShadySue. That was all 'news' to me. I think I'll dump DeepMeta - it's overkill anyway, for the tiny number of images I submit.
So you can in fact submit keywords outside the CV - but of course the reviewers have to approve of them, right?
You can add them with the caveats I've mentioned. If the inspectors mistakenly reject a correct keyword, you can either ask for peer opinion on the keywords forum (if it's a more subjective, concept-y keyword; I don't get involved in these at all, else I'd spend my life wiki-ing 'adorable' 'cute', etc from pot ugly weans) or if you know you're right you can appeal to Scout, Ethan (emyerson) or Ducksandwich. But they often look into keyword threads anyway.
15134
« on: May 05, 2010, 16:45 »
is there someone who can explain what IS search engine does with words that are not in CV? Seriously, this is not a trick question or an ironic one. Does it count these words or not? Like names of cities that are not in CV for example.
I sort of covered that in the above post, but to be specific: A town near me is called Kilwinning and it's not in the CV. If I took a photo of Kilwinning and added Kilwinning 'for my own use' as explained above, any searcher wanting a photo of Kilwinning would be able to find it, no problem, just by typing in Kilwinning. Where you'd have problems is where either the place name is used in many places, for example there's a small village in Ayrshire called Moscow (!) or the village I was brought up in is called Law. Now since there's a place called Moscow, and Law has other meanings, you can't add the word 'for your own use' and you have to decide whether to ask the Metadata Team (via Ducksandwich) to add it, or maybe, in the cases of Moscow and Law, decided that the chances of anyone looking for an image of these villages on iStock are remote, and send them to Alamy or another RM site. (Don't get me started on Alamy's much worse search system and engine. I try to limit my rants on that topic!).
15135
« on: May 05, 2010, 16:40 »
Adding the same keyword after approval, even tho it doesn't suggests relevant keyword from CV
That's the part I don't get - apparently you can add keywords that aren't in the CV, but I don't understand how/when you can do this, and DeepMeta doesn't make it clear to me.
As you can see I'm just not the right personality type for IStock 
I don't upload or keyword using Deep Meta - I don't think the limited part of the CV that I noticed there the last time I looked (ages ago) matched up with what I mostly do; it's more geared up to the top 'Stock-y' themes, which is fair enough. So uploading using iStock's on system, when you type in e.g. 'spingleplonk' which isn't in the CV, you get a blue message saying 'spingleplonk is unknown'. You then click on the link (it's blue, so that was a clue) you then get, "If you choose to add this new tag it will be for your personal use only, and will not be added into the structure of the Controlled Vocabulary for translation. If you feel this is a tag that is a necessity for the CV, please email [email protected] with the relevant details." There's then an 'add' button which you click and that adds the word in English only. If it's one word like spingleplonk, buyers will find it by typing in spingleplonk, but it won't be translated into the other iStock languages, which may or may not matter, depending on the word. If you type in a word of phrase that someone else has added 'for their own use', it will appear in the Terms column with a ! in a triangle beside it, which lets you know it's not in the official CV, and is only available in English (or whatever language you keyworded in). Like I wanted 'curly-horned' recently; it wasn't in the CV, but someone else had already added it. (LOL! I just checked and the 'someone else' was me last year!!!) If the keyword you want to add is a phrase, a buyer needs to know, by osmosis, that they need to put it into quotes, e.g. when they search they have to put "curly horned" or "blue sky" into the search engine, whereas if you type clear sky in the Search box, Clear Sky will appear underneath, and if you click on that, you'll get the phrase "Clear Sky" to search on. I have NO idea why whoever wrote the CV went for Clear Sky rather than Blue Sky, but there you go. And strangest of all, these non-CV words are called 'legacy terms' even if you add them tomorrow. Hope that helped. Now you can sort out my flat light rejections. ;-)
15136
« on: May 05, 2010, 15:13 »
I suggest things all the time. Sometimes they get changed immediately, sometimes after weeks or months, sometimes not yet. But if more people did it, the system would be vastly improved, provided they increased the Team Metadata to cope.
So when you say you suggest things all the time, do you mean that you use the "Wrong Keywords, Tell Us" function when you look at the keywords for an image, or do you make suggestions some other way? Just wondering what the best way to do it is.
I do a lot of wiking with a few words in my area of interest. Some are spam, some 'genuine mistakes'. If the latter, sometimes I SM the author first, as I'd hope people would do with me if I made a mistake. But also sometimes when I'm wiki-ing, I find that the person has keyworded correctly, but the CV maps it wrongly; this often happens in the natural history field. In that case, I SM ducksandwich. Same if I find when I'm uploading that a word doesn't exist or is mapped wrongly. If it's just some lesser known species I just leave it 'for my own use' if it isn't in the CV, but if the CV is wrong I SM Ducksandwich. I also SM Ducksandwich to ask for general additions, especially if the word you want already exists with a different mapping, meaning you can't actually have it even just 'for your own use', which often happens with place names. If I'm not sure, I post for other opinions on the Keywords forum, and Duck or Ethan usually pipe in with an authoritative view. (Sometimes you'd be surprised why they can't make what seem like very obvious changes. Like monkey is given as a subset of ape and vice versa, but apparently Italian, which is one of iStock's languages, unbelievably doesn't have different words for monkey and ape - at least a couple of Italians chipped in and said so, and Google translate gives scimmia for both. All that said, I think iStock generally has the best system and gives the best returns, but it's definitely a 'work in progress'.
15137
« on: May 05, 2010, 14:38 »
I hope it dies, and i hope it'll die very quick too.
+1
15138
« on: May 05, 2010, 12:43 »
I was saying, I think IS should invest more in faster development of CV. They should have more people more specialized in some areas who will develop CV. I don't think they have to pay huge money to genetic engineers, or linguists, or astronomers. I think they should pay some small money to more people who would help development of CV in certain areas.
Exactly! Better yet they could take advantage of the vast wealth of knowledge from their contributor base and allow contributors to suggest alternate meanings. Many contributors uploading in specialized areas know enough to suggest relevant terms. Istock would only need one or two people to approve or reject those suggestions. A simple google search would help them determine if the suggestion was valid.
I suggest things all the time. Sometimes they get changed immediately, sometimes after weeks or months, sometimes not yet. But if more people did it, the system would be vastly improved, provided they increased the Team Metadata to cope.
15139
« on: May 05, 2010, 12:41 »
"Thermal", attached to a group of soaring, circling birds, makes perfect sense. That is in fact exactly what the photo is showing. It's not the photographer's fault that our atmosphere is transparent and so a 'thermal' is invisible.
Ok then __ let's see how much it helps not having a CV and where the word 'thermal' can be used with complete freedom by the contributor. Try doing a search at FT on 'bird thermal' and see what you get. DT isn't much better.
And at Alamy, as you might guess, it's hysterical. With whichever meaning of hysterical you choose.
15140
« on: May 05, 2010, 10:37 »
[snip]
And a buyer is supposed to understand all of the above when searching for images? I know I would get frustrated and go somewhere else. I totally understand the concept of the CV and in a lot of instances it works, but in a lot it doesn't. There is a lot more work to be done on that whole technology.
Hahahahaha That was my roundabout way of saying that 'soaring' should be a subset of flying, and 'thermal' should be allowed with this meaning!
15141
« on: May 05, 2010, 10:24 »
Agree! the Alamy search is far better and more effective then any Micro-search. You can tell the Alamy people have invested quite some money for their search-engine. They dont play it cheapskate.
He's being sarcastic everyone!!! Today I had several hits on a search for end of road not sign. None of them were relevant, though none of them had a sign. But they were all roads, one featuring the end of a bridge, the others being in the West 'End' of either Glasgow or Edinburgh. I suspect the dreadful search engine is a bigger reason for sales falling there than cheaper competition from micros.
15142
« on: May 05, 2010, 10:18 »
Thermal is not visible it self, but the only thing that birds use to fly in circles and gain altitude is thermal, so it's visible in some way. Air is also not visible, right? But the air is often used as a keyword. So, it's not really true that only visible things are included in vocabulary. Wind is also invisible, but branches and grass swinging on the wind are visible, as well as birds soaring on the thermal. It's a very specific phenomenon, and it can't be replaced with just "flying" or "soaring".
You're right. and in any case 'soar' maps only to 'flying', so if you type in bird soaring you have to wade through 19518 results. Photos only takes it down to 14722. Add 'group of animals' and you're down to 851, but none of the 'top 200' are soaring in a thermal. However, Vulture, group of animals, flying cuts right down to two, both vultures in thermals. Of course, I don't know how many I've missed by doing that (people who didn't put 'group of birds', perhaps because they put 'small group of birds' or 'medium group of birds'. One more turns up by searching on flock vultures, though flock is pretty inaccurate IMO. Interestingly, although soaring maps only to flying, 'gliding' is a keyword in its own right, presumably because it relates to gliding (the sport).
15143
« on: May 04, 2010, 16:28 »
BTW I think Alamy's search is much better than any micro site's.
That's clearly missing a smiley! Alamy's search is just embarrassing. No CV, no DA, takes keywords from all over the place. If your name can be a possible keyword, e.g. House or London, your images will turn up in searches for that term, no matter how irrelevant. My name turns up in searches for Leyden (alternative spelling of the Dutch city) and even once on a search for a person called 'Elizabeth House', because my pseudonym first name is Elizabeth and it was a photo of a house.
15144
« on: May 04, 2010, 13:52 »
why not try the keyword forum? ...
That makes sense, if you have an image that you think will eventually make some money on IS. Otherwise it's just one more hoop to jump through, while chasing 30 cent sales.
But like most other things (but not the bizarrely random bad light rejections I get, of course  ) once you 'get' keywording, you get it. Also, it's an area where some inspectors aren't too hot, so often wrong. For example, just look at the most recent acceptances for 'commercial kitchen'. Almost half of the first page sorted by 'age' shouldn't have that keyword. It's disheartening.
15145
« on: May 04, 2010, 13:12 »
I am quite new to this, but find this iStock rejection puzzling:
The following keywords used for this file do not appear to be fully relevant to the subject.
{[aluminum, classic, drill, gimlet, isolated, metal, retro, tool]}
Makes it hard to take them seriously.
Well, I know you used words from the description, but you have to not think in the old terms of describing an image. For instance, if I search for aluminum, do you think I am looking for a drill? Probably not, I am likely looking for sheets or rolls of aluminum, or aluminum at the mill, etc. and to see your drill, even though it's made of aluminum, is not what I would be expecting. I thought a gimlet was a drink. I have never heard any male in my family refer to any tools as a gimlet, but maybe I am wrong about that one. In other words, they want you to pare down your keywords to the most important ones that apply.
I'm not sure why isolated is included in a rejected keyword, as from your image above it does look isolated. This is where scout comes in. And where I agree a simple sentence explanation would help.
If the only rejection is for keywords, i.e. there isn't another reason, why not try the keyword forum? I understand what cclapper is saying, but if that drill is 'aluminium', then 'aluminium' is correct for that image. According to "define: gimlet" at Google, a gimlet is a hand tool for drilling holes, so not applicable in this case. IMO your other words are fine. Try the keywording forum and maybe Ethan or Ducksandwich will chip in with a definitive explanation. Actually, even if there was another issue, it would still be worth getting clarification on these keywords.
15146
« on: May 02, 2010, 16:56 »
Hurro,
Is it worth the effort?
I've (finally) got with the reset of the world and started using deepmeta, and I noticed that it's a lot quicker to DA old images using it than the web site (no surprise really)
So, my question for the day, is it worth going through and DA'ing older images?
Cheers, Chris H.
Yes, of course. Why would you want to p*ss off buyers?
15147
« on: May 02, 2010, 15:11 »
I couldn't agree more. I have no problem with istocks High standards and review policy. I just wish they would strip out all the inferior quallity they have on there which would never get through now... That would truly set them apart and stop me wading through poorer stuff when I'm sourcing images... I just don't get it. Who's benefitting from that?
Are you sorting by Best Match? In general (though there were wild swings in the ten or so days just past) it should give the most relevant hits.
15148
« on: May 02, 2010, 12:25 »
I'm not talking about the quality of the photography simple the availability of correct subject matter, locations and accessories for those photographers.
Clothing styles, architecture, furniture, etc. all vary from country to country and designers do care about those details.
I'm guessing that markets in other countries will be targetted as time goes on. Any time I've looked actually to buy (very seldom, to be honest) I haven't found what I wanted because the 'look' is too American. That's understandable as it's the main market. But the style doesn't translate, even to the UK a lot of the time, far less other cultures.
15149
« on: May 02, 2010, 06:46 »
Beautiful : thanks for sharing this.
15150
« on: May 02, 2010, 03:17 »
The rules keep changing and new submissions are held to ever higher standards, and rejected - leaving old submissions, which don't meet the new standards, to keep pulling in the money. It is not clear to me how this improves things for buyers.
Yes, I've noticed that. I'm sure at least half of my top ten wouldn't get in now, but they're still my best sellers. Go figure.
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