Get your images seen

If you're like most photographers, when it comes to uploading new images to Trigger you don't want to spend hours slaving over IPTC file data. It's the boring stuff that can add days to your file preparation before you get to uploading your high res files to us but unfortunately this dull wordy stuff is vital!! Having a good description and the right keywords with your images is very important if you're in this seriously and you want your images to stand any chance of being seen. Clients use these words to search and find your images so you need to try and put yourself in their position, what words would they use? It's not easy and it's virtually impossible to cover all possibilities and of course you are competing with all the other photographers using the same keywords. If you're not using software to help you select your keywords the next best thing is an online Thesaurus. It will open your mind to word associations you just had not considered but remember one thing, be accurate. The worst thing you can do is add keywords that are not relevant, this will send your valuable potential clients scurrying away frustrated as they see how unprofessional and unreliable your keywording is. So what else can help? Well, being a photographer in a small agency like Trigger rather than a giant like Getty has it's advantages. You simply have a better chance of being seen in a gallery of 10,000 images rather than 20,000,000.

Keywords are only part of the story of course, once the client finds your image you then have to have inspiring shots, with good lighting and great models with content that fits the client brief exactly and a suitable fee to fit the client budget!

Many photographers trying to sell their imagery for the first time as stock think it is a simple process of getting images with an agency and then they will sell themselves. At Trigger we edit hard to present the best images to our clients so they don't have to search through thousands of average images they can find elsewhere, but we live in an age flooded with digital photography where the number of images available far outstrips the demand. The general consensus is that most sales are made from only 10% of images held in a gallery. So, you need to produce imagery that is in the top 10%. That's the hard bit.

By regularly updating your images at Trigger your images go to the top of our 'Just Arrived' gallery and these get seen by designers on a daily basis, we also promote new images via social networking. So you can use this gallery to enhance the publicity of your images before keywords are even used by our clients.

There is keyword software to help in the time consuming process, but we can't recommend any particular supplier: http://www.imagekeyworder.com/ you can download this and try it free for 30 days.

just arrived - Images by Trigger Image