ianevans - 7:34 am on Jul 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Well, one thing about the stock photo sites is that their photo descriptions are varied and quite specific:

Man buying widget
Woman fixing widget in Texas field
Chinese students studying widgets

All the sorts of things that people making brochures about widgets are looking for.

In some categories there are only so many ways to skin a cat. An example I've used here before:

Tedster at the Webmasterworld ceremony. If I'm taking several photos (say hundreds of this prestigious event) there's some duplication in titles.

Tedster at the Webmasterworld ceremony
ianevans at the Webmasterworld ceremony
Robert Charlton at the Webmasterworld ceremony

Only one or two words difference. Now, if I was trying to sell stock I might try titling the photo:

Tedster in powder blue tuxedo at webmasterworld ceremony.

Again though, it's a difference in timing. A stock photo company is all about finding a picture of a woman in red eating an ice cream in Houston. So they have editors whose only job is to tag the hair, the hair length, the dress, the dress colour, designer, style, the watch...

As you can see, a news site like mine doesn't have the time to spend on that much tagging.

If I take 500 photos at an event, I also don't have time to rename each photo to some of the specifics we see suggested, like red-widget.jpg, tedster-in-widget.jpg.

I did start doing that on some thumbnail pages as I created the thumbnails automatically through PHP and so created names based on who was in the photo. But then you hear that Google favours the larger images, so...