News, Views + Info
Image keywording tips and more to help you make improvements to work practices, and get a better understanding of issues surrounding the management and profitability of image businesses.
Harvested Keywords – Rubbish In, Rubbish Out
Harvesting captions and other metadata to construct keywords is a seductive idea, as if it can deliver meaningful keywording for free. However, there are significant limitations with such an approach. Here are the most important problems: 1. The quality of metadata...
Head In The Sand When Assessing Staff?
Deciding whether staff resources are being used efficiently, and whether staff are doing a good job, are unpleasant tasks which image library managers often avoid. But keeping your head in the sand over productivity and accuracy of the team is a bad mistake. In the...
Know Your Audience
Keywording to the right sort of standard, with the right sort of vocabulary is largely determined by the audience you are trying to appeal to. Working out who the audience is may be trickier than you think though. Although it is tempting to say that keywords...
Paps Separated By A Common Language
Ever wondered how different things are on the other side of the ditch? The following excerpt from Paul Harris of the Press Association explains some of the finer points of discourse amongst monkeys (photographers) in Britain. For assistance with marketing and sales...
Image Galleries Sales Opportunity
The duplication of effort involved in preparing galleries of celebrity and news images for blogs and web sites presents a sales opportunity for switched on photo agencies. The size of that opportunity was brought home by a former client working on the digital edition...
It’s Time To Do Something
With all sorts of upheavals in the image business, it is easy for smaller players to sit on their hands because they are unsure of what to do, or because they hope that one of the bigger players is going to buy them. Both are big mistakes. The photo agencies that will...
Using The World’s Largest Super Computer
Introducing the world's largest supercomputer used at Picsell Media - the human brain. When it comes to working with images, you can't do better. There's a lot of talk these days about automating tasks in the picture business by using artificial intelligence. But...
Social Media To Decide Best Celebrity-Brand Connection
Deciding which celebrity-brand connections are the most powerful is no longer a matter of guess work. Using social media rankings you can keep you in touch with who is hot and who is not. It is relatively well known that Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Taylor swift...
Hoping More Than Hitting?
It's a great hope that every image sent to clients will be looked at, considered and compared to its rivals, and a decision made on merit as to which to use and buy. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Although everyone in the image business knows...
Utilising Brands For Organisations
It's not just fancy fashion houses that live off their brands. The mundane and the worthy also benefit from being seen with or near celebrities. Forget slingbacks, handbags and halter-necks - we're talking about construction companies, not-for-profit organisations...
Mixing Your Deadlines To Maximise Cash
Being first with the news isn't always best, as deadlines become more and more complex amongst the many forms of publications, both physical and electronic. Working out the right mix of delivery deadlines for the latest images can help you maximise sales. In the days...
Brand Of Opportunity
With all the industry talk about finding new ways to make money from celebrity images, you'd think that monetising the brands found within such pics would be well-tilled ground by now. But that's not the case - there are still plenty of opportunities. Amongst photo...