AI Keywording Enhanced
With Human Expertise
Elevate your AI keywording to the level it needs to be. Our AI Professional and AI Mechanic services solve the problems raw AI keywording doesn’t, by fixing errors and adding crucial keywords using the world’s greatest supercomputer – the human brain.
AI Keywording with Human Review and Flexible Service Levels
The Limits of AI Keywording
Artificial Intelligence has transformed keywording. It can tag thousands of images and videos in minutes, generating basic metadata at a scale and price never possible before.
But cheapness and speed comes at a cost. AI keywording isn’t enough. On its own, machine-generated metadata can be inaccurate, context-blind, and often fails to meet stock agency standards. If you rely on AI alone, you risk rejections, missed sales, and unhappy contributors.
That’s why at Picsell Media, we combine AI tools with the human brain — the world’s most powerful computer. Our AI Mechanic and AI Professional services take AI’s raw output and elevate it to commercial-grade keywording.
Why AI Alone Falls Short
There are a series of well-known problems with AI keywording. Even AI companies themselves admit it.
“AI keywording is usually a mix of object detection accuracy, dataset biases, confidence thresholds, and context-blindness. That’s why human curation or post-editing is often still needed when accuracy matters (e.g., stock photography, search indexing).” – ChatGPT
“Human input and prompt engineering still remain a crucial component in steering AI-generated outputs toward meaningful, accurate, and impactful outcomes.” – Google Gemini
The Common Pitfalls
1. Limits of Object Detection – Wolves mistaken for dogs; weddings mistaken for parties.
2. Bias Toward Common Objects – AI defaults to generic tags like “car” or “tree,” skipping rarer details like “clarinet.”
3. Failure to Capture Context – A protest becomes “people, street, signs” instead of “demonstration.”
4. Confidence Thresholds – AI excludes valid objects if it isn’t “confident” enough.
5. Ambiguity in Language – Sofa vs. couch; “red sports car” shortened to just “car.”
6. Focus on Salient Features Only – Mountains tagged, but the eagle in the sky ignored.
Legal Dangers
Beyond quality issues, you could face civil or even criminal action if your keywords are misleading, defamatory or breach privacy or model releases.
What All This Means for You
- Missed keywords buyers actually search for
- Agency rejections for spammy or irrelevant tagging
- Lost contributor trust when errors reduce sales
- Greater legal risks
Making AI Work for You
AI keywording has its place. It’s a quick way to generate a baseline of search terms. But for commercial libraries, accuracy and relevance matter far more than volume.
That’s where we come in. Our hybrid approach combines AI’s scale with human expertise, giving you:
- Keywords that meet Getty, Adobe, and bespoke standards
- Higher discoverability and sales potential
- Happy contributors who see their work represented well
- Lower legal risks
OUR AI SERVICES
AI Mechanic
Send us the images/videos with their existing AI keywords and our team of experienced keyworders in Auckland and Cape Town will carry out the enhancement work needed to get them to the commercial standard required for searchability and keywording standard compliance. Prices POA. Enquire for a quote.
AI Professional
Leave it all to us. We’ll use our own AI system, synthesised with our human resources to keyword from scratch. All you have to do is send us the images/videos and nominate the standard of keywording you want.
Choose from Bronze, Silver and Gold Standards. See pricing and examples below.
Crucial Keywords
We can add crucial keywords such as obvious objects, species and locations that are often missed due to limitations and failure to collect important extra info supplied by the client.
Ethnicity, Age, Sex
Based on your information, we can add appropriate age, ethnicity and gender keywords that are crucial components for images with people. AI often misses these due to “confidence” problems.
ID Real People
Facial recognition is hampered by a lack of suitable image examples for AI to learn from. Our keyworders can recognise additional people and will use caption and other information for identification.
Remove Guesses
AI keywording engines sometimes guess when confronted with objects such as flora and fauna. Our keyworders can resolve guesses using their general knowledge and research, or remove the term.
Remove Spam
AI often generates keyword spam – barely relevant terms that pad out the keyword count. These mark you down in the eyes of image/video resellers and buyers. Our team can remove those words.
Submission Standards
Our team is familiar with keyword submission standards of the likes of Getty and Alamy, making your images comply by adding the right and removing the wrong keywords and meeting the keyword count.
AI Professional Keywording
You can choose AI Professional keywording from three standards and price points – Bronze, Silver and Gold. By outsourcing, you’ll avoid the false economy of having your own staff do the work, even if they’re assisted by AI.
See the details below, plus examples. If you’d like to try our services, your first 500 images are half price!
See the Difference: AI Keywording Examples
AI alone often produces metadata that looks acceptable on the surface but fails when tested against real-world standards and buyer expectations. To demonstrate how our services transform raw AI output into submission-ready, sales-driven keywording, we’ve prepared examples of the same images keyworded under our three levels of AI Professional service.
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Bronze – We take AI’s raw output, strip away irrelevant or misleading terms, and keep only accurate keywords. This eliminates “spam” metadata that hurts discoverability and can cause agency rejections.
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Silver – Builds on Bronze by manually adding essential keywords that AI missed, such as context, emotions, and secondary objects that are critical for sales.
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Gold – Our most advanced service, where we not only correct and enhance AI results but also apply a custom vocabulary (“cue card”) tailored to your library’s taxonomy or agency requirements, ensuring precision and consistency across entire collections.
These examples highlight how much is lost when AI alone is used — and how much value is gained when human expertise enhances AI output.
Scroll through the samples below to see the difference Bronze, Silver, and Gold keywording makes in practice.
Trusted By Industry Leaders
Over the years, Picsell Media has worked with some of the biggest names in the image and media industry. Our keywording services have supported leading stock agencies, archives, and editorial libraries — helping their content reach buyers worldwide. Here’s a selection of clients in our “hall of fame” who’ve trusted us to deliver accuracy and consistency in their metadata.
FAQs: AI Keywording With More
Why isn’t AI keywording enough?
AI is fast and cheap, but it often misinterprets context, misses subtle details, or adds irrelevant keywords. Human oversight ensures quality and accuracy.
What are the Bronze, Silver and Gold keywording services?
These tiers reflect different levels of human involvement and keywording depth, letting you choose the right balance between cost and precision.
Can you keyword videos as well as photos?
Yes. Picsell Media provides keywording for both still images and video clips, plus alt-txt for websites.
Do you follow controlled vocabularies?
Yes. We can use industry-standard vocabularies or your custom lists to ensure consistent metadata.
Who uses Picsell Media’s keywording services?
Our clients include image libraries, news agencies, publishers, NGOs, and businesses that rely on accurate search results to increase sales.
How quickly can you deliver keyworded files?
Turnaround times depend on volume, but our AI-plus-human workflow allows for fast delivery without compromising quality.