How Do I Keyword the People in My Images II

In my last post I covered the major elements to keywording people:

• Number of People that are the subject of the image.
• “Industry standard” age/gender groups such as male adult and female senior adult.
• Family relationship portrayed in the image.
• Ethnicities or races of the people in the image.

This post will cover a lot of the other keywords you should be adding to your images of people.

Angle of View and Body Length

These two are much more important that you might think.  Editors often know what kind of shot they are looking for and these are two qualities that they are often looking for.

There are three basic angles of view:

• front view
• side view (profile is a type of side view)
• back view

Every person has one of these angles to the viewer, so you might as well keyword it.  A few other searches at Alamy.com gave me these results:

• woman: 2,580,483 results
• woman front view:  282,273 results
• woman side view:  158,651 results
• woman back view:  54,448 results

Less than 20% of images with women in them have any angle of view keywords with them.  A rough extrapolation indicates that there are about 1,000,000 images of women that are front views that would not be shown to buyers looking for women front view.

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Last week I wrote an introduction to my guide to keywording, emphasizing the reasons that you need to give some time and thought to your keywords, and there will be a direct increase in sales if you do. This week, I will delve into the details of keywording people. People are such an important part of stock images, and buyers will be searching for a lot more than just woman or boy.

A search for woman at Alamy.com returned 2,608,284 images.  Obviously way too many to search through, so buyers almost always start adding other keywords to the search.

So, for example, they know they are looking for an image of just one woman, and a search for one woman only gets 322,700 results.

But, in quickly looking through these images, they realize they need a Caucasian woman search for one woman only Caucasian gets 173,633 results.

Then the searcher adds living room and front view, and a search for one woman only Caucasian front view living room gets 520 results.

You get the idea. You need to get found in the last search because your image has a much better chance of being seen and bought. If you didn’t get seen in that last search because your image didn’t have one of the qualities, that’s fine, it wasn’t going to get purchased by that buyer anyway. But what if your image did have all those qualities, but was lacking the right keywords? Then you might have missed a sale.

Alright, let’s get to the list of people qualities you better be keywording, starting with an obvious one that is often missed by photographers:

How many people are in your image?

• one person: these first five keywords are used to describe the number of people who are the subject of the image.
• two people
• three people
• four people
• five people
• group of people:  GettyImages divides this into small group of people, medium group of people and large group of people and you might as well follow their lead.
• nobody or no people: use both, every time there are no people in the image.
• background people:  use this every time there are people in the image who are not the subject of the image, whether in the background or foreground, and regardless of whether there are other people as the subject of the image or not.

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