I'm glad that you like it
In this case maybe you could consider a click on the ad after you finish your work with the tool ... ;-)
thanx
M.

Hi,

finally I found the company that will run the site free of charge with no traffic limitations. That's why we don't need to charge users for searching. No registering needed, no deposits, no charges. Enjoy at www.findphotokeywords.com.

M.

I will... thanx.
m.

This is just to share what I discovered. I asked the Istock support this question:

A friend of mine - designer - wanted to buy some photos from Istock. I personally created an account for him less than 14 days ago, using my referral code. I did it from the pc that never opened istock page. I created the account (karolskolar) according all the guided steps. Today he wrote me that he bought first photo. But I cannot see anything in my referral earnings.

The answer was:

The referrals that come from site badges and/or moo cards require that the user sign up from the page the link sends them too. This will usually be your profile page, if they navigate elsewhere prior to signing up you will not receive the referral.

I replied that in their info on the account page is written: "However, you can also create custom referral URLs that link to any iStockphoto page. Simply add refnum=Yourmemberprofilenamehere to any URL and replace the 'href' parameter in the HTML code provided below.". Then I asked if that means that if I use http://istockphoto.com/index.php?refnum=Yourmemberprofilenamehere whether am I safe with the obstacles.

The answer was:
That is correct, and yes the referral program is very convoluted. Generally I get people to make their link go directly to the sing up page, gives you the best turn over. If you want to be sure the get your referrals use the refer a fired and not the site badges.

This is really something that makes me angry, because it means that due to their idiot system I publish ads for them, send them clients without even one cent as a reward ...

Maros

to madelaide : the history of the page shows that with donations and ads it doesn't work In fact, there were exactly 3 donations during Nov. 11th - Jan 1st. 2008. Anyka's extraordinary donation among them...

Looks like asking the microstocks for permission to use the keywords is the way - but for now it is too  soon to talk about it ...

M.

Anyka: you already proved that I keep my promises. The active user will get special offers, so don't worry, for you will stay the site open unchanged :-)

For public users: I have 2 microstocks they already  allowed me to use their keywprds and I work on the rest. Be patient, everything can be solved.

M.

to Valaaami: yes, unless you they allow you to do it. But you are right and I will deal with it.

As well many people think that I do it for profit and I really don't need to argue or proof the truth. I wanted to do it as helpful service, but for me there is no reason to put more energy to something that I need every day fight for.

Anyway - most probably the costs will be not covered from the paid searches so the decision is made even easier.

That's why in next days I will close the page for public. Sorry. Active registered members with active deposit can expect special offers for handling the situation.

Thank to all for support.

M.

In fact the users get the 5% of bought searches as discount (if you pay 5 USD you should get 100 searches, but you get 105, if 50 USD you should get 1000 but you get 1050).

I can make it more progressive - running up to 25 % - if you pay for 100 searches you get 105 (5% bonus), if you pay for 1000 searches you could get 1250 (25% bonus).

This is a good idea.

M.

michealo : I use different service but I can show you my counts on your example:

Looking at the statistics you tells you that the page counted more than 8200 searches since Jan 1st from which approx. 200 was paid (in fact - it is hard to say exact number, because some of the users got free searches for helping with the tuning so they used it for testing purposes).

Let's say that average amount of images to show is 100 images in one search (non paid 20, paid up to 200, many times applied filter, ...), each image of 7 kbs = 8200 searches * 100 images * 7 kbs = 5,74 GB = traffic just on images + add some traffic with ads and other data transferred in each search can make some 15 GB of traffic per month.  (Am I counting right ?)

The lowest prices you can calculate here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html# , you can enter storage 1 GB, Transfer-in 1 Gb, Transfer-out 20 GB (just to be sure we put some more than needs to be) and 10000 requests PUT/lists and other as well 10000. The price for month is calculated as 3,76 USD per month, which means that 75,2 searches per month per price 5 cents per search should cover it.

All together it means that if I used your favorite service I would earn 200*0.05 - Amazon costs = 6.24 USD. And we still didn't count the domain registering costs and some service setting costs (mailserver setting, ...) which is not much, but still some. Unfortunately I use service which is more expensive, because in the time I published this page I was not so clever and I didn't understand all the things as I do it now. But the 1 year contract is already set so I have to deal with it.

Am I still counting correctly ?

From this point might the flat rate for any amount look too expensive. However - I cannot expect how many searches it could be per month in the flat rate and I need to be sure that it will cover the costs. That's why I asked about it. Maybe the question was wrong and should be : How many searches do you think can productive photographer make per one month ? Then I could count the price of subscription....

M.

to michealo  and FlemishDreams: Guys, I got your point, but there is one point you missed - I don't run the page to profit from it. In other words the fee per search was counted as aliquot part of the cost of web hosting, domain and cost for traffic over the limit. As I wrote in previous messages this page was made for my own purposes and I run it more than year on my local comp and then my friends told me that would be nice to have it publicly accessible. First month (Nov-Dec 2008) I run it for free, but the cost for traffic over the quota was higher than the income from adds and donations. That's why I had to make it other way - pay per search, because you can easily count how much data is transferred in one search. Now I'm looking for ways how to run it as cheap as possible for most of the users.

January is almost over and soon I will get the statistics for cost of traffic. Then I will see if the 'payments' cover the costs. If not, I will close the service, run it locally or let it only for friends - without exceeding the traffic cost.

You can argue with that, but tis is the true behind the fees. Believe it or not - it is up to you.

M.

Thanks for your feedbacks.

Yes, you are right counting how much it is per year as well as counting with other free services like the our one. As you can see the idea of counting came from the average searching amount and cost per search. Your feedback tells me - in other words - that you think 0.05 USD per search is a bit too much. This is a question for me: if you are effective you will need 1-2 searches per one bunch of images. Usually the photographer makes few different images of the same thing, so he can effectively use the same keywords for more images and add only 1-2 words related to specifics of each image. If you count that you pay let's say 0.1 USD per extraordinary keywords for bunch of images I don't see it as too much. Of course if you need a lot of searches for a lot of different images - maybe subscription is better for you.

As well you need to count that you can select the keywords from 5 microstocks (will be more) in one search ! That saves you a lot of your time - comparing 0.1 USD with the free ones where you search only one microstock.

And one more thing - you can decide to pay subscription for one month when you have a lot of photos and the other months you do it as pay-per-search - or according to your needs.

Anyway - the main question is : Do you think subscription is a good idea? If so, what would be optimal amount per month (we can see 20 USD looks like too much for you :-) ?

Thanks for feedback

to leaf : Thanks for information, I'll check the bug.

Maros

Hallo all,

Few feedbacks lead me to to re-think the subscription type payments. Little counting: let's say you are a productive photographer and you create 10 unique images per day. You go to the site and look for the image. Because you are not perfect you need eg. 15 searches to find the correct keywords for all the images (remember that you use the same keywords for more images in the serie). You work 22 days per month, that gives us 15*22 = 330 searches per month. In actual rating it would cost you 16.5 USD.

Using this mathematics - what would you say to the idea of subscription flat fee 20 USD per month ?

Of course - there still would be the chance to pay for each search (actual setting). So you could choose to pay per search or pay by subscription.

Thanx for feedback

M.

Hi,

some of you asked me to add some professional photo stocks. Here we go with the first one - I added new microstock to the searching engine - Getty Images. 

As well I corrected some minor bugs they appeared while selecting and sorting the final list of keywords.

Thanx to everybody for help - especially to Jansphotos.net and Richard (RTimages).

Enjoy the power of searching 5 photobanks in one time !

M.

to litifeta: thanks for joining and idea how to deal with commas.

However - it's a bug :-) I'll correct it asap.

M.

Thanks Anyka, I'll check the bug
M.

Friends in photography,
I heard an idea: when you have to pay per search and sometimes you need more then one search per image to receive a result that you are happy with, then it can get expensive to keyword a particular image. Some photographers may find it more attractive to pay a subscription fee per year for this service.

Technically should be possible to implement both systems - if you want to pay per search then OK, if you decide to pay by subscription, the Ok as well.

The question is - how much do you think is reasonable charge per month/week/day

Thanks for your opinions and ideas.

Maros

Hallo to all,

I get some mails with complains that 3 initial searches is not enough for discovering the site.

That's why I decided to rise initial number of free of charge searches from actual 3 to 8. Ihope this is enought to make a good picture about the site and discover the possibilities.

All users already registered will therefore get 5 searches more free of charge.

Enjoy 

M.

Dear friends,

I updated the webpage to brand new version. New version includes 2 different statuses: registered/unregistered user. Registered users pay for searching (currently 0.05 USD per one search), unregistered don't pay. The big difference is in service you get:

With searching as registered user you will:

    * get first 3 paid-version searches free of charge without making any deposit
    * get rid of all the ads
    * be able to search 4 microstock in one time !!!
    * choose the image types to show
    * get result of keywords from 4 different microstock photobanks (not a final number ...)
    * be able to see up to 80 images from one microstock and up to 200 thumbnails to choose from
    * see up to 300 keyword ideas (in case the result returns so many)
    * be able to keep your deposit unlimited time
    * choose to remember selected images and search for another and finally get the keyword results for all of them
    * get the one search cost ( currently 0.05 USD) the same for the rest of the life of your account - even in the case the cost for one search will be raised in future
    * and other benefits

I highly recommend to read the info under "You should read this information" at the webpage where I explain all the features, restrictions and other things.

Any ideas are welcomed and I'm looking forward for your reactions.

M.

To Dook: it is simple - if you search eg. for word dog, you will get different images of dogs. So you pick some images of dogs - let's say 5 images. The system then goes through all the keywords of all 5 images and uses them for calculations. It is obvious that 5 of them will have in the keywords word DOG, let's say 3 of them ANIMAL, and let's say 2 of them PET. So the 'uses' means how often is the word used among all keywords of picked images. Clear now?

If you propone any other method for calculations I can implement it in the new - almost done - version, that will be able to search in multiple microstocks, will have more options for final keywords lits, ... etc. It will be my X-mass surprise but so far needs some more time to be finished :-)

M.

ahh that's true .. this small feature could do it ... if not, just write here. Maybe you have really found a bug ...
M.

to CofkoCof : you should be able to search :
- shutterstock
- dreamstime
- fotolia
- istockphoto

Do you experience any problems seeing all four of them?

M.

I understand, add the keyword you can do simply by writing it to the text field - it is possible. As I got it this solution miss the function of checking duplications if any of your added keywords is already entered.

It is no problem to add the Add keyword input field. I'll do it in next days.

M.

I did small change on the separating words for Alamy, because I surprisingly realized that Alamy expects the words separated by space, not comma or other symbol. As well they accept quotation marks for keywords made of more words etc. The work on this didn't finish, I want to implement some more things, but the basic is done.

Just an idea: if 60 images is not enough, isn't it a time to specify more the search query ? as well you can pick some images, remember them by clicking to that specific link and search again and possibly be more accurate ...and finally get keywords from all your searches ... you just have to keep in mind that too much images selected (let's say more than 15) could case the timeout of the script ...

I will think of any technical solution of more pages. So far I know that dreamstime offers 80 images on one page so that may be a start point ...

However - now the page traffic is 2 times bigger than on any other of my quite active webpages, which means that if I will find the solution for more images in the same time I will have to start to think about covering the traffic ...

M.

As I promised before, I added the search engine for new microstock photobank - DREAMSTIME.

Enjoy

PS: I want to thank to Noam for his donation - the first and only :-)