Zymmetrical requires now the selection of a category and a minimum of 10 keywords.

Something needs to be done to balance out resources. We're not prepared to cut the commission rate nor impose upload quantity limits. When some people upload 1000 images with no categories, our staff sits there plunking them in, while others who participate fully, must wait because of that.   It was inconsistent and this became more apparent as we scaled.

Categorization is and always has been an essential element in online stock and in general, product selling - why do you think Amazon.com and Ebay.com feature in the most prominent position on their sites - yep, categories.  It is unfortunate the importance of categories has been downplayed by elements of microstock, in the rush to appease contributors and hit X million images in the libraries.  We are, however, not microstock by definition - no subscriptions, flat commission rate, no tiered earnings, so on and so forth - as Sbotas asked a while ago, "what makes zymmetrical different so that people should pay higher prices" - enhanced metadata is one part of this offering.

Anyhow - i'm not going to try and sell you on how fun it is to categorize, I know we generally all could think of more interesting things to do, so i'm happy to say that enforcing the category selection is a short-term measure only - we are testing some code that uses image recognition and other factors to auto-categorize the images. So when you select an image in "Describe" it will have the most likely category already assigned - as soon as we get the tolerance percentage high enough, we will put it on online.

A few sites try to auto-categorize but I don't think it works well enough.  I don't like spending time picking categories for an image that is then rejected.  I wouldn't mind so much adding categories after an image has been accepted.  I am not convinced categories are worth it and there are higher priced sites like alamy that don't use them and sell more than zym, so any way of saving us time would be appreciated.

From the agencies where you have to categorize, I think BigStock has the best system. You pick the first image from your FTP upload and it will display all the IPTC information with auto select three categories. If one category is incorrect you change it of deselect the category. You click submit and you have the next image with its data and categories in front of you. Very fast and easy. No carefully checking if anything is left check from the last image or not, because you don't want to overwrite accidentally you keywords and categories from the current image with the one from the last.

I tried to submit one with a category and keywords but it wont let me.  I am using firefox.