A Short Cut For Photobuyers
Photo researchers, art buyers, editors, designers, even everyday citizens, now use Google and other search engines to find hard-to-locate pictures, or photographers who have coverage of the subject
HINT: To search, you can’t just list a single word, like ‘cat.’ Searchers don’t list single words because they know they’ll get a million ‘hits.’ You can’t list single or double words, --you have to be specific, with three and four words in a descriptive phrase (unless your subject is so rare that few photographers will have it, such as the name of a certain dog training school in Peru. Don’t laugh -we get this kind of request all the time in our marketletter for researchers and photographers, the PhotoDaily).
The PhotoSourceBANK is the electronic partner of the PhotoSourceBOOK, where photographers have entered more than 2,000,000 words and phrases describing the images they have available. The PhotoSourceBANK has been in business since 1999. Back in 1999 and 2000 few people could understand why we were building a databank of text, especially when image-based sites were becoming readily available on the net. But as the amount of images on the Internet grows, the law of diminishing returns takes effect. Searching through scores of images for a particular need can be time-consuming and hard on the eyes!
The search process through text descriptions, in contrast, is automatic, immediate, and precise.
We continue to build the PhotoSourceBANK and our goal is 3 million descriptive phrases referring to available images, by December 2007.
You can try it. Type (in Google) a phrase describing an image that you think would be hard to find (example: flyfishing in Sweden), and then type the word photosource, in the Google search bar.
Or "vet doing eye exam on dog photosource.” (Note the word photosource). You don’t have to always use the quotes, but in some searches it narrows the search down quicker.
Try some of your own out-of-the-way selections, the kind only you would have need for.
Then try Getty, Jupiter or Corbis. You won’t find such images there. (All you have to type in the address bar is search.photosource.com and the free research service will come up. (No need to type the http://www) A photo researcher will say, “Why search through thousands of woodpecker shots if what I’m really looking for is a Red Bellied Woodpecker in a hole?”
So the researcher goes to Google and types in:
Red Bellied Woodpecker in hole, then the word photosource.
Presto!
The photobuyer has found the source (the photographer) who has this hard-to-locate image, and it wasn’t in Getty Images.
This is a boon for the individual photographer, and an insurance that Getty, Corbis and the other ‘big guns’ aren’t going to ‘takePhotoSourceBANK was getting started seven years ago.
The way the digital world is moving now, a photographer can effortlessly have a lightbox or hi-res
Of course, it is easy for a photobuyer to make that simple search with five words – but it’s not easy for the photographer to type in key phrases and labels for everything in his/her database. Every photographer, it seems, puts the task off, until they hear from some stock photographer that “she sold a picture for $250 because the photobuyer found her through the PhotoSourceBANK.”
You can tell from all of the above that I am passionate about keyword searching and the way it has exploded in the past few years. Everyone uses Google now. And increasing numbers of photo researchers are turning to Google (and similar favorite search engines) to save time in locating the sources of their out-of-the-ordinary photo needs.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, 1910 35th Road, Osceola, WI 54020 USA. Email: info@photosource.com Telephone: 1 800 223 3860 Fax: 1 715 248 7394. Web: www.search.photosource.com
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