News and Stock

Drawing on Years of Keywording Experience

Keywording news, sport and stock images requires the use of specialist vocabularies including technical terms where appropriate.  Conceptual terms such as “victory”, “despair” and “devastation” may be as important if not more so, than literal terms capturing what can be seen in each frame.  This is particularly so for stock images.

Keedup has years of experience keywording creative stock images for supply to Getty Images, Corbis and Alamy.  This experience is readily transferable to editorial stock keywording.

We have developed specialist vocabularies to meet the Getty submission standard, as well as our Comprehensive and Essential stock standards.  In 2010 we worked with the Canadian Press Association to develop a vocabulary for categorising images taken by its photographers at the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

With news and sports images, time to market is a key factor in making sales.  Poorly-performing photo businesses, and even large wire agencies, can be guilty of sending their images into the market without full keywords because they can’t get the work done in a timely manner.  Keedup specialises in getting such work done in a matter of hours or even minutes.  And we’re on deck 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  News never stops, and neither do we.

Meeting your budget is always a concern, and we can help with that by altering the depth of keywording or the number of images keyworded to give you the right result.  With the overwhelming number of news images being produced each day, compromises such as cluster keywording – giving a large group of images identical keywords – may be the best answer.

Image triage is another option. Some images, say of particular people involved in minor news or sports events, are not keyworded, others get basic keywords.  A small proportion of enduring illustrative value (including potential as editorial stock) are keyworded to a higher standard, perhaps after the initial keywording which is more focused on speed.

Our keyworders generally have a background or interest in journalism, and have a wide general knowledge. That means they understand what sort of things photo editors are looking for, and can deliver the results accurately and efficiently.  As well as keywording, 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.

The bottom line is that you can get a reputation among your clients (and your own researchers) for being a beacon of searchability, bringing repeat business and keeping existing business, whilst also meeting deadlines.

 

 

 


 

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.

Scaleability 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 wait for the next lot of images to come in.

Defamatory keywords and captions – We’ve seen plenty of examples of photographers and photo agencies’ own staff defaming people photographed, wrongly 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.

 

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