I go along at a merry rate, and every so often ... BOOM!  The keyword monster gets his or her hands on my files in the review queue.  Someone with the intelligence of a brick and about as much imagination.  Always happens after about half of a series of similar shots has been approved with the same set of keywords (by a sane person).  I understand that not everyone has the expertise to understand the connection between certain objects/themes/concepts because nobody is an expert in every field ... but when the concept has been explained in detail in the photo description then I assume that the reviewer is either stubborn as a mule, or else is non-English speaking and has no time for pasting into "google translate."

My response ... cut back the keywords to the absolute minimum that even a moron could not misinterpret ... [indoors, one person, well dressed, looking at camera, studio shot] ... get them approved, and add the keywords back later.

I do this for a while, then I forget how painful it was to re-upload, and I slowly start adding more keywords to the initial upload getting more and more detailed until ... BOOM!

The trend may be changing, but whenever I have done a search for a people-shot of some kind of profession or situation and sort the results by number of downloads, the beautiful/handsome people have the most downloads and the normal-looking people are at the end.  Not only are the bestsellers uncommonly good looking, but they're often better dressed and more excessively made up than real people would be.

Another problem is that "real" people tend to have real jobs and have no financial motivation to pose for stock photos, and don't particularly feel like giving away freebies to photographers.  And for professional reasons they do not want their picture showing up all over stock websites or worse in a billboard or magazine ad.

As for the scene looking fake or not ... the problem is that more "real" the situation is, the harder to control the lighting, the more people in the shot from whom model releases are required, and the more copyrighted or trademarked objects which appear.  I shot in a "real" elementary school classroom the other day and there was hardly a square inch that did not have copyrighted materials displayed.  I had to do a lot of re-arranging and the teacher was not thrilled at the number of posters, etc. that I took off the walls and the number of desks that I moved.  Even if you do all the work to create the lighting, get the model releases or shoo people out of the way, and remove and/or photoshop trademarks etc., such a photo might not sell - because the real world is chaotic and messy, but graphic artists need to tell simple, clear stories with the materials they create.  Often what they are selling is a product or service whose selling point is simplicity, clarity, ease of use, etc. so photos are required which help to give this impression.

Also, most people think they are better-than-average looking, they want to associate with other good-looking people, and they react more positively to pictures of beautiful people than of normal or ugly people.  The crude expression in English is "sex sells" but to give a more Darwinian definition, "good genes sell".  Curves, muscles, good bone structure, thick hair and robust youthfulness are all signs of genetic fitness and primates are naturally attracted to these individuals not only as potential mates, but as good providers from whom they could benefit by association.

But I'm not a graphic artist and I don't know any personally - I would still like anyone out there who buys photos regularly to add their comments and show what they consider to be good and bad examples.

Thanks!  I see that bronze exclusives get approx. $0.76 per XS download, which would be almost a 3 times pay increase for the 30 to 40 percent of my downloads which are XS.

I'm sure I'll get used to navigating around in the new design, but when you list your uploads, I hope they will figure out how to make each row skinnier so that more images can be listed on a single page.  Maybe this varies by browser ... I'm using firefox 3.6.8 on windows.

...
Light me up or use more common words for nonnative english speakers...
...

Hi Suljo, yes it's Pain In The Ass.  Don't feel bad, everyone (including native English speakers) gets behind on Internet slang because it's evolving every five minutes.  But there is help, just go over to UrbanDictionary.com whenever you see something new.  I learn new slang there all the time.  Here's a couple you can practice on: OMFG, SOL, BRB

Quote from: pet_chia on July 23, 2010, 13:45

A picture taken under a tree with dappled sunlight => "lighting could be improved".  An ordinary landscape with out-of-the-camera settings => "over-filtered/over-processed".  And so on.

"Dappled sunlight" normally looks pretty bad when people are sitting in it.  "out-of-the-camera settings" often results in artifacting from heavy .jpg processing. 

Thank you for the suggestions.  It wasn't a people picture under dappled sunlight.  I think it was a perfectly valid exposure given the highlight/shadow situation.  If the opinion of the general public matters, people who saw the photo on my monitor when I loaded it into the computer said, "That's a nice photo!"  No need to show everybody the photo to quibble over, you can believe me or don't.

The other shot was not JPG out of the camera, it was raw, and in Digital Photo Professional I gave one "bump" upward to saturation to what was a slightly dull photo due to the cloudy light.  Nothing extreme - I did not give it "Top Shot of the Month" saturation    I dialed back the sharpening a notch and otherwise left it alone, saved to 16 bit TIF, shopped out a couple of faces, saved as JPG, 100%, etc.  Who knows if a tree looks "too green"?  One can either upload a slightly dull photo and hope that the customers will see something with potential if they jazz it up a bit, or one can process the photo to give it "curbside appeal" so that they will actually notice the picture when they are scanning through pages of thumbnails.

To be fair to the reviewers and the review process, none of these photos was particularly striking or commercial looking.  They were more like, "10 sales over 2 years" type of photo.  Possibly the reviewers sensed this, but for whatever reason they hit the "bad lighting" or "over filtered" button instead.  Maybe they were inexperienced, or maybe they just didn't want to have it scouted if they made the subjective call "not suitable for stock" or whatever other buttons are provided to them for saying, "Meh."

Maybe the real lesson is, don't even lift the camera up and take the picture unless what you're looking at is an obviously striking composition of a really appealing subject, with excellent lighting.  It has to be something that's going to grab the reviewers, or else is such an obvious best-seller that it will be worth fighting for in scout.  From now on my motto is, "No More Meh!"

I don't see a big difference between giving away pictures free, and earning $0.26 "XSmall" royalties, of which I have seen an inordinate number lately.  /gripe

It's difficult to say without see the image, but as a general rule you should only keyword for the dominant colour of the image and not the objects in it. And you shouldn't keyword anything that's not prominently featured in or a necessary part of the image. Using "flower" for an image titled "woman working in garden" would likely be okay, but not for "woman working in office".

Thanks, this helps a lot.  Some of the rejected keywords were not "dominant" things and were reasonable by these criteria, a few of the rejects were just plain goofy, since they described important elements of the photo.  No need to post the photo and slice and dice it, I meekly resubmitted and after it is accepted I will add back one or two of the most critical keywords.

Well done, and thanks for sharing.  I find it very encouraging.

One obvious fact  - all these shots are about good-looking young models.  If I submitted a photo of a pipe wrench with a similarly artistic treatment, would it get in?  

Which reminds me.  Years ago, I was thumbing through a book in a camera store aimed at amateur photogs called "How to Take Better People Pictures".  It only took a minute or so of flipping the pages before a light bulb came on.  The secret of better people pictures is to find better looking people!  Humans seem to be hard wired to enjoy looking at images of young and above-average looking people, and everything else is like, meh.

Now when I flip through pages of similar stock photo shots, from best to worst selling the only really key differences that strike me are (1) good looking models, as opposed to uglier models in worst-selling pictures (and of course I don't mean ugly at all but the models are very ordinary, *regular* looking folks), and (2) extremely simple, clean composition.  With pictures of pipe wrenches it's the same thing - the new, clean and shiny pipe wrench in a simple bold composition with a clean background will get the downloads every time.

Every so often it seems you get someone who's maybe a newb inspector trying to follow the letter of the law (or an embittered old one) who complains about keywords ... like it's a picture of a pencil sharpener but there isn't a pencil in the picture so you shouldn't have included the word "pencil".  So you just cut down the keywords to the minimum, get it approved and later on do a bit of judicious keyword amendment.

I managed to do some uploads and got a couple of files approved during these last few days, but AFAICT nothing that I have uploaded in the past 2-3 weeks is showing up in any keyword search.

If uploading "seems" to be working and you have a backlog of photos it may be worth it to keep uploading and not lose your window.

On the other hand if you keep on uploading but the images don't show up in searches then you may lose the one-time "bump" that new images supposedly have in the best match algorithm.

Conclusion: I know nothing.