Keywords (partial listing for example) : Wind Turbine, Alternative Energy, Eco-friendly, Beach, Coastal

The single most effective way to organize and categorize your images is to keyword (sometimes referred to as tag) them. Keywords can be words or phrases and you use them to associate a photograph with a scene, style, location, feeling, time and so forth – basically anything that can help describe the image. They can be abstract, such as “eco-friendly”, or direct such as “wind turbine”.

For people who take photos just to share with family and friends, the more direct, subject-driven keywords are usually sufficient. There’s no real need to go any further than that and get into emotive or descriptive language. For people who take photos for a living or have a desire to do so, then using more descriptive types of keywording can both save you time when searching for an image to fit a client’s need, and give you an edge if the images are placed in a stock library where others will do the searching. Additionally, for working photographers, there are other IPTC fields in the metadata where some terms, such as location information, is best placed.

Keywords for your use only don’t need to be as comprehensive as they do for publicly searchable photos (defined here as any database others can search). Using the keyword “beach” for example will be all you’ll need to find your own beach photos. For publicly searchable databases, including additional, related terms such as “coast”, “sea”, “shore”, “ocean” and so on is often useful.

It’s often possible to assign the more generic keywords upon import through the use of metadata presets. You can create and save different combinations of information and keywords that can be applied in batch during the import process. We’ll look more at this is a future tip.

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