Once you get started with Digital Asset Management (DAM) software you will quickly run into another management issue: your keywords. I believe any DAM software user will eventually ask himself the question: how am I supposed to create my keywords? Reading various internet sources on the subject I usually run into two kinds of advice: some say you should just start adding keywords to your images while others say you should be careful and think through your keywords before creating them. Even though it seems that most advice falls in the first category, I happen to fall into the second category. I do believe that you should be careful when you create keywords primarily because if you create too many, then you will have to manage your keywords as well pretty soon…as if managing your pictures is not enough headache.

Why think about your keywords?

Adding efficient keywords to your digital pictures requires significant effort and I believe you have to have a strategy for directing that effort. So, what do you need to be thinking about when developing keywords for your pictures? I created a list of five steps that should help you think through the potential problems when developing keywords for tagging your picture collection.

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How old is your strategy for creating image keywords?

STEP 1: Imagine what searches you would be performing

Try to think about the kinds of pictures you’re taking and imagine what you would be searching against. For example: You want to find out all the pictures taken in Yellowstone National Park that have deer in them and they were taken at sunset. All these highlighted words would represent actual keywords but at this time try to think in terms of categories that these keywords fall under. So, would you be searching for cities? Or events? Or animals? Or parks? There might be more than one answer to this question, like both events and animals, or both parks and animals. The answers to this question would help you identify the categories (or domains) that you currently have for your pictures.

The example I have given would result in three image categories (or domains): parks, animals and time of day. The scenario I have presented above would represent finding the pictures that belong to the intersection of these three image categories. The more scenarios you can think of the more categories you you may discover for your pictures.

STEP 2: Define image keywords for each category of images

Step 1 will help you manage your keywords so that they’re somewhat organized in your mind. This will help you so that you won’t have too many duplicate image keywords…hopefully none . For example when you think about the parks image category you can create keywords like: yosemite, yellowstone, sequoia, santa monica and others, depending on your pictures. Your software should help you group your image keywords into categories which would represent your image categories. An image keyoword category like animals will be pretty easy to work with; you just start listing the animals in your pictures as you find them. Most people would probably use the events category together with many other domains. The events domain would contain keywords like birthday, graduation, game, hiking_trip, photo_trip, biking_trip and so on. Some people create a date domain as well, even though keywords would not be needed since the “Date picture taken” field would contain all the information about dates.

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