Tagging.tech presents an audio interview with Kirsti O’Sullivan about keywording services

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Keywording Now: Practical Advice on using Image Recognition and Keywording Services

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Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:  This is Tagging.tech. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Kirsti O’Sullivan. Kirsti, how are you?

Kirsti O’Sullivan:  I’m good, thanks for having me.

Henrik:  Kirsti, who are you and what do you do?

Kirsti:  [laughs] I am the Managing Director of Keywording.com. Keywording.com offers outsourced keywording services to, in large part, the stock photography industry, but we do have people with internal collections that we do keywording for.

We do tagging for stills and for video. We’ve done illustrations and graphic designs, but basically we do the outsourced keywording for anybody who needs it. Depending on their target audience, we’ll get them what they need.

Henrik:  Kirsti, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with keywording services?

Kirsti:  I think one of the biggest things that we see, that could be better from the client side perspective, is to have someone who owns the keywording piece within in your company. I know often times these companies aren’t very large, and it’s quite difficult to have one person who owns one job.

With keywording, the consistency and continuity is huge, and so your main goal is to always drive yourself towards consistency. How can you put things in place that make it the most consistent possible?

Oftentimes, you’re having someone come in temporarily to help you do the keywording, or that person doesn’t stay very long, and so you’ve got turnover in terms of who’s actually doing it.

You want to put processes or documents in place that give you as much quality control along the way as possible. That’s the biggest drawback that we see. We will start off with one person, who then leaves, rather abruptly sometimes, and we’re with a new person who probably doesn’t know much about keywording and we are starting over.

That’s one of our biggest challenges when taking on a new client. The successes are that having a keywording service do all of your keywording so one source, or one person for that matter, and we can just call it a source. Having one source do virtually all of your keywording makes your collection that much more valuable.

You’ve got a consistently tagged asset versus the biggest challenge we just talked about, which is having any number of people having done it any number of different ways. You’ve basically got a collection that’s hit or miss when you do a keyword search.

Thinking about what you want to do with your collection down the line ‑‑ and I think it’s even fair to even say 10–15 years down the line ‑‑ the more that you can point at this and say, “This is keyworded consistently 100 percent from beginning to end” is really a huge value when you are trying to sell your collection, frankly.

We do definitely ask clients, “What have you done in the past?” A lot of times they have not thought through how they want to categorize their collections. They don’t have an answer to give me, but we do want them to have thought about like, “How do you categorize these different types of pictures?” depending on the collection that’s coming to us.

Obviously, if you have a wildlife collection, you probably have thought much more thoroughly through how to categorize your collection. It’s a very straightforward thing to actually think about.

If you look at a lifestyle collection, trying to get categories out of something that’s so broad and could be any number of topics, is more difficult. If they have that, we absolutely incorporate it. If they don’t, we have our own that we institute.

We also try to ‑‑ and this is also quite difficult ‑‑ we would like to be involved in what were you thinking when you were designing this shoot? What is your intent in creating these pictures?

When the creative director is thinking about putting this together, what are the concepts and the things that you are trying to illustrate?

Trying to get that information to filter down to us and/or to whoever is going to be doing the keywording for you because that’s your intent. That’s super important, but is quite actually difficult in the workflow to make that happen.

Re‑keywording is probably our biggest challenge, and one we actually have chosen to say no to. Oftentimes people will come to us and say, “I’ve got 10,000 images I’ve keyworded and we need you to fix them.”

There’s some things that we can do to fix them. We can run through and analyze the words across the collection and say, “We can fix the misspellings easy enough,” and we can say, “This isn’t the right term,” or we can take out the plurals. It’s a much harder job to fix bad keywording than it is to start over.

Basically, we’ll have a look to see if there’s anything we can do, but 100 percent our answer is, “It’s going to be cheaper for me to do this again the right way.” Our advice is, do it once and do it right, whether it’s for yourself ‑‑ because it’s certainly possible ‑‑ or have someone do it for you right the first time.

The other piece of that is you need to watch the store. I think we are the best at what we do in the industry, but that doesn’t mean you turn a blind eye to what it is we are doing. If you don’t give us feedback, we have to proceed like we’re doing it exactly the way you want.

If you are not telling us this is good, or this is not so good, or I want this different, we have no way to know that we’re not doing what you want. We had one client who was really angry, who had said nothing to us for a whole year, and that we weren’t putting this particular keyword on these images. No one was looking at what we sent them. What do you do?

My advice to people who do take on keywording services is, don’t assume that they are doing good work for you. Make sure that someone’s checking that work. We strive really hard to check our work. Nothing goes straight from the keyworder to the client. There’s always someone with the second pair of eyes looking at it.</