In the cards for stock photography...
A New Way Of
Finding Photos





         Captions, captions, captions. In my seminars I used to advise that captions were not necessary, unless your stock photography pertains to scientific, travel, news, documentary, geographic or technical
 
subject matter. The reason? Most editorial photos sold are images that portray a concept: quietude, serenity, speed, force, violence and so on, and the photo editor usually doesn't need to know where all that is happening, or who or what is portrayed. Photobuyers found these editorial pictures by category, at agencies or by direct contact with their list of photographers.

         Times have changed. In the stock photography world of the near future, photo editors who need generic commercial stock photos to illustrate a general concept will easily find such photos on a CD-ROM disc, or in a print catalog or its on-line service counterpart.

         But if they need a highly specific picture (and the publishing industry is moving rapidly in the direction of using more precise, defined-content photos) they will search out their highly specific needs on the Web - by means of locating captions, or "identifiers," giving brief desriptions of the images.

A NEW NAME FOR CAPTIONS
         For example, knowledgeable photo editors nowadays know they can do key word searches on the Web, using search engines such as AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!, to zero in on specific sources for their particular photo need (from lists of text descriptions of photos put on the Web by increasing numbers of photographers).

         What we used to call "captions" we can now call identifiers. These are simple words that allow a photo researcher to find your photos. This is how it works: if a publication is doing an article on earthquakes and mentions the 1989 quake that hit San Francisco during baseball's World Series, in the past they would probably have gone with just a photo of Candlestick Park. To find a specific picture of the effect of the quake on the ballpark would have been too time - consuming. Now, the editor just has to enter key words for a search on the Web: Candlestick, Candle Stick, World Series, earthquake, earth quake, baseball, San Francisco. Notice that I intentionally put in different forms of some of the words. The Reason: photo researchers, including foreign buyers, will sometimes misspell their search identifiers. You can anticipate this and enter different forms and spellings to place extensive "identifiers" with each of your photos when you enter them in your Web site directory. It costs no more.

         How soon will this kind of photo research come about? Today the system is in its infancy. Photobuyers get swamped with too many responses to searches, for example. They experience mistakes
and failures. Those are operational hazards in treasure hunts. But there are "street-smart" photo researchers on the information highway who are using this method today and having success at finding obscure photo needs. Once stock photographers begin to realize the potential of listing their photo identifiers on the Web, more photo researchers will begin to use this powerful research tool.

         Improved software will refine search engines to be capable of more precise targeted responses and we'll see software come along that will assist photographers in entering descriptions (text identifiers) of their photo collections onto a Web site. If you have your collection arranged in database form, you are already halfway there. You can transfer it. Next step is to build a Web site and get into the action. -RE

Note: For this article I needed to know the name of the baseball park and the year the earthquake hit. Our nearest library is in Osceola, 12 miles away. Instead, using the Web, I was able to find the details in a matter of minutes using the search engine, AltaVista.

Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes.


           


           

Tommy Thompson

Kerry Kolb

Jon Saban

Jake Nelson