Besides Moshe Zusman's tips for online marketing, you should consider other ways to ensure that you—and others—will be able to track your photos online. At the same time, you must pay heed to copyrighting your photos. It's not all about watermarking either. Here are some tips on how I do it in Lightroom 3.
Keywords
By adding keywords to your images, you'll be making it much easier to search for them in the future. In the image above, I keyworded the image with specific, carefully thought-out keywords. Here's a close-up of exactly what I did.
Why did I use these keywords?
- B&H – Because these photos are for B&H
- BHInsights – The photos are meant to be used on BHInsights
- BHInsights.com – This is just a modification of the previous keyword
- Canon T3i – The images were shot with the Canon T3i
- Chris Gampat – That's me :)
- Image quality – Because the image will probably be used to demonstrate the image quality of the Canon T3i, and it's a search term people would use.
- NYC – It was shot in NYC. People have typed terms into Google like, "The best camera for a vacation to NYC."
- Review – Because the photo will be used as part of a review.
There are many other keywords that could be appropriate, but for simplicity, we'll stay with these. Just keep this in mind as your guide: If you were searching for images like those that you shot, what would you type into Google Image Search? If you're writing a blog post in the likes of Blogger or Wordpress, the tags that you create for that post should match up in some ways with your keywords. Ultimately, the keywords of the images and the tags in the blog post should complement one another.
Copyright, Creator and Captions
Besides keywords, there is other important information that needs to be embedded into your images. Captions are important for a few reasons:
- They can describe the images in a series.
- It is another place where you can insert some of the keywords or tags that you will use when the content goes online.
- You can sometimes place entire search term entries into the caption, such as, "Canon T3i High ISO Test."
While captions are important, inserting your copyright is critical. Ideally, you'll want Copyright and Creator to be similar (or the same). An exception: if the images are for an agency, in which case you may want to give one of those entries to the company.
If you have a government-issued/registered copyright, you may choose to insert that in the copyright status.
Naming During the Image Export
When you're exporting your images, it's important that you name them correctly for easier searchability online. Take a look at this batch that I exported from Lightroom 3.
As you can see, I named them in accordance with the keywords that I typed into the field previously. The reason for this is to keep consistency and continuity. The set that I exported was: shot by me; for BHInsights.com; with the Canon T3i; it may be part of a review; and was shot in New York City. Naming it this way is a lot more sensible than having called it something like "Random street shooting around NYC." If I named it like that, I would have a hard time searching, at some later date, for the photos that I shot with the Canon T3i. Keep these tips in mind.
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