The fact that good keywording and captioning improves searchability and sales is almost axiomatic.  With good workflow and a 24 hour service, getting images to market in a timely fashion gives another competitive advantage.

On the expense side of the ledger, outsourced keywording puts library owners in better control of costs and the quality their money buys.  Whilst the temptation is to keep spending low by using non-specialists or opting for inconsistent low-grade keywording at the outset, we have almost lost count of the number of companies who have approached us to sort out the mess that causes.  Such clients are understandable unhappy about having to have keywording done twice.  That can easily be avoided by doing the job right first time.

As well as the basic revenue and costs benefits, entirely new revenue streams can be developed if they haven’t been already.

Archive Keywording

Many publishers, photographers, image libraries and charitable institutions own marketable archives, but have little idea how to make them earn money.

Keedup can help clients turn their archive from a liability to an asset – not just in terms of keywording and metadata – but also in organising the overall process of getting your images online.  As well as our own expertise, we have contacts with other specialists who can help clients with sales, marketing and scanning.

For hard-copy archives – made up of transparencies and prints – the first question is how to get the images scanned economically.  Keedup can help clients make this process easier by editing the images so that only best images are scanned and keyworded.

With digital archives, the problem is often that the images or videos are organised in a maze of folders.  We can assist in making sense of that maze by cataloguing, then sorting so that the best production is put online.

In both cases, our Image Triage service can keep costs manageable by working out which images need no keywording, which need a low level, and which would benefit from full, detailed keywording.  Often it is better to but 90 per cent of the effort into 10 per cent of the archive, which greatly improves the economics of the project.

Archives often have a particular focus or speciality, and so a specialist keywording vocabulary may be needed, something Keedup as managed on numerous occasions.

Even functioning image businesses which make the vast majority of sales from newly-added images or videos, can boost sales from old production with the judicious use of keywording.

An important spin-off benefit of having a well-organised and keyworded archive is that it makes it far more attractive for sale to some of the bigger image aggregators such as Getty Images and Corbis.  If that is your aim, we can make recommendations for keywording which will help meet that goal, such as by meeting the particular keywording standards of the prospective buyer.

Video Keywording

Many traditional photo libraries are realising the power of adding moving images to their existing stills production to boost sales, particularly in an age when blogs are taking over from traditional print publishers.  Perhaps due to the lower number of videos most companies produce, keywording and other metadata is often neglected.

Keedup can help you put your video archive ahead of the pack by including relevant keywords from the start.

As well as keywording the visuals, it may be important to include keywords regarding the audio segment.  Technical terms relating to video techniques can also be crucial.  Keedup has developed its own vocabulary segments to deal with such matters and has experience with various video formats.