Celebrity Keywording

Become Famous for Searchability

Whilst keywording of stock photographs has been relatively well organised since digital imagery began, due to the sheer volume of images being generated, celebrity image keywording has lagged behind.  Putting keywording in the too hard basket has often been the “solution”.  As a result, the market leaders have stolen a march on the rest of the field with fast, consistent, relevant keywording.

In recent years resolving this problem has become more urgent, with increasing image numbers overall, and aggregating sites such as Getty Images and IDS selling collections from numerous contributors.  This has made, making sales even more dependent on good keywording to get images included in search results ahead of competitors with similar images.

Time to market is another factor.  Poorly-performing photo businesses often send their images into the market without keywords because they can’t get keywording done in a timely manner.  Keedup specialises in getting images keyworded properly in hours or even minutes.  And we’re on deck 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

If you want to keep up with the big boys, or cut a special niche for yourself, Keedup can help.

We’ll work with you to decide on the right vocabulary to use – what to emphasise, what to leave out.  Fashion terms, news values, basic keywording – we can help you sort through what you need.  We even have a few tricks up our sleeves that we can use to make your images easier to find than those of your competitors.

Meeting your budget is always a concern, and we can help with that too, altering the depth of keywording or the number of images keyworded to give you the right result.

Keedup has put together some specialised services to meet the specific needs of celebrity image clients:  Fashion Hawk designer label keywording, and A-List keywording where we keyword images of only the biggest stars.

Celebrity Keywording Specialists

Our keyworders are immersed in celebrity culture from each side of the Atlantic and in Australia.  That means they know what terms to use, can identify fashion items, understand what sort of things photo editors and bloggers are looking for, and can deliver the results accurately and efficiently.  While they’re at it, they can fix headlines and make captions literate and relevant, without embarrassing spelling mistakes.

Beyond the skills of Keedup’s staff, we use templates, electronic vocabularies, and specific keywording rules for each client to make sure that keywording is consistent and accurate.  Even the best people need systems to give the extra precision needed in today’s market.

With the Keedup team behind you, you can get a reputation among your clients for being a beacon of searchability.   You will be working with professionals in the field, while your competitors are leaving keywording to photographers, part-timers working from home, outworkers in a third-world country, or staff members who should really be doing sales or organising photographers.

Customers you never knew you lost – The CEO of a major celebrity photo agency once told us that keywording wasn't a problem because none of his customers ever complained about it.  The problem is that customers tend not to complain about bad service or trouble finding what they want to buy – they just go somewhere else.  And image library owners can't rely solely on logs of search results to reveal what’s really going on.  Disgruntled researchers don’t keep searching with keywords that produce poor results.  So if you see mostly celebrity names as search terms, customers may simply realise that other searching is pointless.  It’s only a matter of time before they won’t be adding to those logs anymore.

The real cost of keywording – Companies using  in-house keyworders or outworkers often ignore the full costs of keywording, looking only at the hourly rate paid.  This leaves out the cost of managing, training and hiring those staff members.  And if images can’t be found because of poor keywording, or images don’t get to market fast enough, the hidden cost of bad keywording can grow exponentially.

Scalability problems – One of the problems with keywording live images is that they don’t come in a steady flow.  So if you don’t have professional outsourced keywording you’re faced with three unpalatable choices: leaving the keywording to photographers, having non-keywording staff fit the work in around their other jobs, or having in-house keyworders being paid to do nothing while they wait for the next lot of images to come in.

Defamatory keywords and captions – There are plenty of examples of photographers and photo agencies’ own staff defaming big name celebrities, suggesting they were drunkards, drug takers, and even paedophiles, with injudicious captions and keywords . Our staff remove those sorts of references, and Keedup carries millions of dollars of insurance to cover the unlikely possibility of any defamatory references getting through the net.

Bad spelling – Often the first stage in a celebrity image search is the star’s name.  We've seen images submitted with numerous spelling mistakes, such as five different spellings used for Nicky Hilton.  Keedup maintains a database of celebrity names, making sure our keyworders know such things as the difference between Gordon Ramsay the celebrity chef and Gordon Ramsey the actor, and that Pink’s real name is Alecia Moore.

 

Postal Address: PO Box 37142, Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand, Street Address: Level 1, 20 Augustus Tce, Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand

UK and European Enquiries
enquiries@keedup.co.uk
Phone +44-123-3770044
United States and Other Enquiries
enquiries@keedup.com
Phone +64-9-524-5885