The Art of Keywording: Get the Most out of Your Stock Photos

While it is important to create good, quality images, if you’re looking to sell them through stock agencies, you must do everything to make them as visible as possible. Therefore, the keywording becomes one important aspect of your work.

To increase your visibility, you have to watch if your keywords are too general, or too niche, but you also have to get into the mind of your potential buyers and think about the most likely terms they’ll search to find your photos. It’s a process that will take up a lot of your time, especially in the beginning. But practice makes perfect, and as the time goes by you’ll just get better and faster.

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of keywords, share some tips and best practices that will help you get your stock photos in front of more people and ultimately increase your sales.

3 Types of Keywords

Essentially, stock photography keywords can be divided into three separate groups:

• Literal keywords
• Conceptual keywords
• Stylistic keywords

Literal keywords are those that include who is in the photo, what they’re doing, and where. Conceptual keywords describe emotions, or ideas, while stylistic keywords are related to colors, orientation, and so on. You should always aim to cover all three groups, as this will make it easier for buyers to find your stock photos. 

Start With the Basics

When you start writing down your keywords focus on the obvious first. If you have a photo of a family on the beach you can go with: Family, beach, children, summer, sea. But if you really want to target a specific audience, you should step back and use more specific keywords. Buyers usually search images as specifically as possible to get the exact images they want. Stock websites are overcrowded with content, so they want to minimize the search results as much as possible.

Consider the Emotions

This about the story your photo tells. Is this family having a fun vacation? Do they look angry? Are they smiling or frowning? Add keywords that revolve around the theme of your photo. To go back to our example, you could use words like vacation, family vacation, happy, cheerful, holiday, fun, etc.

You could also use the keywords that are related to viever’s reaction, and what they’ll be feeling when they see the photo.

Take a Step Back

It’s inevitable you’ll overlook something when you start adding keywords for your stock photos. So once you think you’re done, go back to your list again, look at the photos and see what you might be missing. More often than not, photographers forget to include hair color, time of the day, model’s ethnicity, or even the location of the shoot.

While you can say that the location is the beach, try to be more specific - Champagne Beach, Vanuatu. That way, if someone is looking for a photo of that specific beach can run into your image. However, keep in mind that it’s unnecessary to add names of small towns that have no historical or tourist significance. For example, Paris is okay, but naming a small village in Poland probably isn’t because people won’t search for it.

What’s Your Competition Doing?

If you’re running out of ideas on how to keyword your stock photos properly, or you aren’t sure which words you should use - check out the competition. Search for visually similar images, try to think like a buyer - this might also give you some ideas.

Select a couple of photos other photographers are selling and review their ideas. You might be surprised with the words they’re using and think “How did I not think of that?” so it’s definitely worth investing some time into this.

Think About Industries

When people and companies buy stock photos they’re usually using it commercially, meaning that there’s an industry involved. Your beach photo would fall under the travel industry, but it could also be leisure. 

Don’t Stop Testing

After you’ve uploaded your images for sale it doesn’t mean you’re done with them. You should experiment with keywords. Specifically, if your sales are going good, try changing a couple of words, or make them more specific. However, if you aren’t really selling, go through the entire process again. Try using broad words, if that doesn’t work use some that are more precise.

A magic keywording formula that can help you sell more doesn’t exist, that’s why you should play around with words until you’ve found the ones that bring the best results.

What to Do If You’re Stuck?

At one point or another you’ll get stuck with your keywords. You either won’t be inspired to do them, or you just won’t have any ideas. This is when you should ask for help. There are agencies and freelancers who do this type of job, and depending on their experience the prices go from a few cents per image, to a couple of dollars. What you can do is send them five to ten images from your photoshoot and let them do the keywording, after that you can use their keywords to create metadata for the rest of the images for this shoot.

Show the photos to your colleagues, family members and friends, they might have some ideas which you can use. Additionally, their ideas will spark yours as well.

On the other hand, you can also turn to dictionaries or a thesaurus, look for words, but also for their synonyms.

Pro tip: Within StockStudio you can invite keyworders to add metadata to your photo straight into the software. And don’t worry, they won’t be able to see any other information about your images, model releases, etc.

Extra Tips

There are definitely more tips that can help you master the art of keywording for stock photos, and you should try and explore this area as much as you can. But in the end, we’re leaving you with a few more tips you could use:

• Run a spellcheck on all the words you’ve used
• Don’t spam and use irrelevant keywords - agencies can remove them, block your photos, or even ban you from the platform
• Capitalize only words that should be capitalized, it’s easier to read them that way
• Try using scientific names of plants and animals - these are used all over the world and increase your visibility
• Check which languages are supported with your selected agency and add local words
• Include dominant colors - if red prevails in your photo, add it. But, if only a small portion of your image is actually red, it would be best not to add it as a keyword.