Keywords get under my skin. They are so perfect but such a pain in the ass. Anyone that is using Lightroom knows that you can keyword your images for easy distinction and sorting later on. You can keyword your files individually, or you can do batch keywording. You can have Lightroom do it as they're being imported so that every file coming in gets that particular "tag". But what's the rub? What's the catch, and what bothers us about keywording so bad that most of us rarely use the feature? I'll tell you what I think... I think most of us don't use keywording because it's a pain in the neck. Sure we can batch keyword like I said above, but to truly make use of this feature, we have to give individual images keywords. Not just "family photos" or "Smith wedding". We have to go in and select a group of shots within that folder that get not only "Smith wedding", "wedding", "bride", "groom", etc. But they also get "formals" or "Candis", or "ceremony"... To truly use this great image database we have called Lightroom, we have to get very fine and precise about our keywording. If not, why bother. Why bother at all if we don't have them correctly keyworded. If we can't go to the search bar and type in "food photos" or "wedding formals" and have a list of all of the images we've done show up, we're wasting our time. To be quite honest, I don't do that half of the time either. I don't keyword most of the time, because I've got way too many other photos to upload. I'd never be able to get the rest of the images edited. I'd spend all of my time organizing and not enough time editing. Anther thing that bothers me about keywording, well Lighrooms "keyword as you import" feature to be exact, is that sometimes I forget to remove those keywords from the keyword box and all of my images that get imported after that get the wrong keywords. An engagement shoot will end up with the keywords "United Way Executives" or something like that. It's a really bothersome problem. I complain, but I don't have a solution for the problem. In theory the keywords work. You label an image with a "tag" or "keyword" and that's it, but sometimes the most well thought out plans don't work out right...
Thinking of getting into Microstock? Check this guy out:
That folks is your competition in the microstock field. He has 2000 of his images a day downloaded... 2000 a day! I don't know about you, but I can't compete with that.
Ok, that's all I've got. It's Monday, I'm super tired, and staring at this screen isn't helping in that department. See you all tomorrow. Jason
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