“Stadler built British Rail Class 745 FLIRT electric multiple unit Greater Anglia passenger train platform Melton railway station, Suffolk, England, UK”
The caption above makes use of the maximum 150 characters allowed by Alamy. It can be quite a squeeze to include everything necessary within this restriction but this does ensure brevity. The caption needs to provide information about ‘what and where’ for the image. It is often necessary to do a bit of research as in this case to find out the type of train.
Additonal information can then go in the keyword or tags. There is far more room available in this field but there is no point straying far from the most relevant keywords. The aim is to find the right balance rather than include tags that are tangential.
For this image I have :
“UK, United Kingdom, Britain, British, England, English, East Anglia, East Anglian, Suffolk, Melton, train, trains rail, railway, railways, station, platform, transport, transportation, railways, Greater Anglia, arrival, arriving,”
The thing to remember is that a person searching can only find an image by using words. Like many others I don’t find this aspect of the job the most interesting but it really is important.
I discovered how important accuracy in metadata is recently when reviewing the sales of my Mexico 2023 images. Overall the sales have been strong but for one destination I was very disappointed. From this city from around 200 images I had sales for a car, a health poster about dengue fever, a beer bottle, people eating at a restaurant, Mayan street performers, and dolls in craft shop. All images IN the city but not OF the city – they could have been from anywhere in Yucatan or even anywhere in Mexico.
The explanation is straightforward. In all 200 images I had written the city as Vallodolid instead of Valladolid. I’ve had to rework all of them on my website and on Alamy. But worse than that I have had to contact other agencies and admit to my error and create unnecessary work for others.
I do all my captions and keywords within Photoshelter – the web company that has my website and image storage archive. I’ve been using them since 2005 so find it more convenient and quicker than any other option. It’s just what I am used to.
This is screenshot of the work area for my Lowestoft images. I am adding caption and keyword information to all images in the batch. Then I will work through each one individually.
“Screenshot of Photoshelter IPTC fields showing the first step in working on a batch of images from the same place – all images selected and highlighted in blue”
All the images from this Lowestoft trip are in a gallery on my Geography Photos website
The next screenshot is the FTP dialogue box that I use to submit my images to Alamy and some of my other agencies. There is an alternative method called ‘Quick Send’ which I generally use to submit to Universal Images Group ( though FTP is also possible). Everything happens from within Photoshelter.
All these images have been done and are now on Alamy.
“Screenshot of Alamy Image Manager work area where captions and keywords can be added and edited – not something that other agencies make possible”
Now all I have to do is to sit back and wait for the riches to start rolling in!
Before closing I want to mention that Alamy have created an hour long webinar about metadata featuring industry expert Clemency Wright. This goes into real depth and includes discussion of more creative images and conceptual subject matter ( not my area).
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If you happen to spot any errors or omission in my metadata please do let me know in the comments. I’m sure that there will be some errors and typos also words that I forgot to add.