Selling images online: Keywording & categorizing

When you image is uploaded for sale, it is important to add good and relevant keywords, since it's the only reliable method to help the buyers find it. Add as many keywords and phrases as you can think of but avoid keyword spamming - it won't help your image sell better but will just frustrate the potential buyers. Always include conceptual keywords and keywords describing feelings and emotions if they are relevant. Describe all the main details of your photo but avoid mentioning smaller insignificant details like "eyes" or "eyelashes" for a group shot of several people, or "wings" and "beak" for an image of sky with a faraway bird flying across it.

CanStockPhoto provides auto keywords feature automatically suggesting keywords to photos on the bases of the ones already provided. So if you feel like you lack ideas, you can try uploading your photos to CanStockPhoto first to get some more keywords. But always check them for relevancy - don't let the keywording machine spam your artwork. Most of the sites require choosing at least one category for your image (for example, "People", "Landscapes", or "Clothing and Fashion"). Always choose as many relevant categories for your photos as you can, since many buyers use categories instead of keywords when browsing images.

All the modern sites support IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council). IPTC system embeds itself directly into the image and stores all sorts of information such as the photographer's name, copyright, description and keywords. So you don't need to type your keywords every time you upload your image to a site - just do it once. To enter IPTC data into the image, you can for example open it in Photoshop, go to Image Details, fill in Title, Description, and Keywords fields, and save the image. Now all this information is attached to the image, and will be automatically read by the site's uploading system.