Keywording Tips for Stock Photographers, Part 5: Synonyms are Your Friend

Another week, another keywording tip for all you stock photographers out there. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out our previous installments (entries, parts, chapters).

Which leads me to this week’s topic (theme, subject, focus). When it comes to keywording stock images, synonyms are your friend (pal, buddy, mate). There are hundreds of things out there that can be referred to by more than one word. As a stock photographer, you have no way of knowing which word your customers will use in their searches.



This problem (quandary, dilemma, obstacle) is magnified when you think about the international stock photography market. Even nations that speak the same language don’t always use the same words (Are your potential buyers looking for a truck or a lorry?).

This doesn’t mean that you need to spend hours keywording a stock image (photo, photograph, picture) with every possible word variation. But it is a good idea to include some common synonyms in your keywords lists, especially for stock images of popular subjects (think cell phone, cellular phone, mobile phone).

Keywording Tips for Stock Photographers, Part 1: Why Does Keywording Matter?

Photographers are artists, but when they’re submitting their images to microstock sites, they also have to learn the technical side of the industry, including how to accurately assign keywords to stock images. As a professional keyworder with nearly four years of experience in the stock photography industry, I know that the one thing most keyworders will agree on is that there’s a lot of grey area when it comes to keywording stock images.

So what are keywords, and why do they matter? Keywords are descriptive words assigned to an image so that it can be found in a collection of stock images. Keywords are the words that stock photo buyers will enter into a search engine in order to find your images. For example, if a searcher enters the word “dog” into a search engine, the search results will be all the images that have the word “dog” assigned as a keyword.

Keywords are arguably the most important part of a stock photography submission (not that I’m biased or anything) because they allow your images to show up in search results. In other words, keywords are what allow your images to be seen by potential buyers. Customers can’t buy stock images that they can’t find.

Since keyword quality is directly related to sales, savvy photographers need to understand how to maximize the impact of their stock images’ keywords (and therefore, maximize their sales revenue).

In the coming weeks, the Glow Images blog will feature more articles exploring the ins and outs of keywording for stock photography. Keep checking back to find out how you can turn keywords into your stock images’ best assets!