Tagging.tech presents an audio interview with Maura Framrose about keywording services

https://taggingtech.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/maura_framrose.mp3

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Keywording Now: Practical Advice on using Image Recognition and Keywording Services

Now available

keywordingnow.com

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: This is Tagging.tech. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Maura Framrose.

Maura, how are you?

Maura Framrose: Hello, Henrik.

Henrik: Maura, who are you and what do you do?

Maura: My name is Maura. I am an independent keywording specialist. I worked with Getty for five years in the early 2000s, integrating partner data to standardize inputting on search methodology.

I keyword for photographers on their own sites and for distribution and provide consultancy services for archives and migration. I assess existing data and requirements to streamline, simplify, reduce database noise, and to ensure search results are consistent and relevant.

Henrik: Maura, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with keywording services?

Maura: The demand for high volume at low cost can lead to compromise in the quality of keywords and to keyworders being exploited. A good edit is important before images even reach keywording services, as is an understanding of the importance of investing time and attention into keywords.

There is a lovely challenge in the link between what is being tagged and what people actually want to see. As this shifts and changes, keeping up with search trends and adapting keywords to reflect and fulfill expectations beyond the basics, while still being relevant, is a lovely challenge to meet.

Success is a clean and clearly relevant search return on any given keyword or its variants, as this tends to improve sales figures and return visits to websites.

Henrik: As of March 2016, how much of the keywording work is completed by people, versus machines?

Maura: We have to keep up with technology as it changes. We drive those changes ourselves with bugs and fixes, and wish lists improvements, and enhancement features. In tagging an image well, you reflect its true value.

Good software with hierarchy and synonym functionality improves speeds and can automate relevant keywords onto images. These hierarchies, in themselves, require human input and maintenance as language changes and new content is added.

Thanks to the Internet, we are able to research and double check facts much more easily than we could 15 years ago. A curiosity and willingness to check facts is one of the elements which encourages good keywords on an image.

While there is image recognition software in development, which to some extent may be able to automate keywords to images, as a keyworder you’re looking for the attributes which make the image distinct and of human interest.

You’re able to evaluate concepts, emotions, relationships. Who drew the map, who sailed with it, on which voyage, and when? This curiosity for significance may only be answered by machines where the intelligence exists and has been accurately programmed and input to data files in the first place.

Henrik: Maura, what advice would you like to share with people looking into keywording services?

Maura: I would advise you to not be looking for the cheapest option. Having it done cheaply is not necessarily having it done well.

Henrik: Maura, where can we find more information about keywording services?

Maura: We wrote an article with the British Journal of Photography, and I also have several papers planned. I’m on LinkedIn and work with the keywording guild called Word Association.

Henrik: Thanks, Maura. For more on this, visit Tagging.tech.

Thanks again.

For a book about this, visit keywordingnow.com