« Previous || Series: Harness the power of keywords. || Next »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?

Keywording your 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.

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 against 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 domains that you currently have for your pictures.

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

STEP 2: Define image keywords for each domain

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 keywords…hopefully none . For example when you think about the parks domain you can create keywords like: yosemite, yellowstone, sequoia, santa monica and others, depending on your pictures. DAM software should help you group your keywords into categories which would represent your domains. A domain like animals will also be easy to create keywords for. Most people would probably use the events domain 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.

Next Page: Avoid duplicate image keywords

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