ShutterPoint Blog

What is the most crucial point of selling images online? Believe it or not, having an outstanding image is not the answer. That is because in order to sell online, your image must first be found by the image buyer and the most common way to find it is by searching. Therefore, the answer is keywording!

Keywording, or defining the keywords to describe your image, is key to attracting customers to your images.

Remember, the designer who is looking for an image is an intelligent human just like you. He/she has a specific idea of what kind of image is needed and to find it, will input just a few words into the search field. Your task is to figure out what these few words might be.

This is a photo of a young woman in a black swimming suit, coming out from being under water, flipping her hair back, and creating a big splash with water. Her setting is in a swimming pool.

The paragraph above should really be the description of this photo. It also contains information that can be used for keywords.

When defining keywords for your image, start naming exactly what is depicted in the photo. Lets start with this:

“woman in water, hair flip, woman in pool, wet woman, woman, female, girl, swimsuit, bikini, hair, flip, flipping, swimming, swim, pool, water, liquid, wet, splash, in”

Now we have keywords describing the visible attributes of the image. Notice that phrases are ok to use. If the image buyer will be looking for simply “woman in water,” we are covered for that in the basic list. But what if the image buyer has something else in mind. Lets think about what else might be happening in this photograph. How about we add these to our existing keywords:

“action, vacation, summer, play, cheerful, relaxation, relaxing, happy, sexy, fun, active”

By adding keywords that suggest the setting or mood of an image, we are opening up for more interpretations of the image, and thus more usage possibilities. Now if someone is looking for “relaxing vacation” photo or “fun in water” photo, this image will come up.

Try to order the keywords in order of relevance. Note that keyword “sexy” will trigger the adult content filter. If your images do not imply adult content, avoid keywords that suggest adult content and your images will always show up in search results, regardless of content filter settings.

Keywording guidelines

• Use commas as delimiters for words
• Use singular form, not plural (unless its an irregular noun: e.g. man/men; foot/feet)
• Include both singular and plural for irregular nouns
• Do not put a period at end of list (it will be used as part of last keyword)
• Avoid non-readable characters (!#$%, etc.)
• Use dash (-) only if it is part of the keyword
• Do not use name of the model unless it is a known celebrity
• Avoid unrelated keywords (e.g. stock photography, high resolution, portrait orientation)
• When including keywords in foreign language, make sure same set of keywords in English is added
• When using misspellings of words, make sure the correctly spelled keyword is present

ShutterPoint encourages the use of IPTC standards. When you submit image files containing IPTC profiles, the site will pre-fill the fields with the data extracted from the IPTC profiles - keywords, titles, descriptions, and copyright information.

Remember to always check your keyword lists after uploading images, just to be sure!