How to Correctly Title, Keyword and Picture Caption your Photographs

This document is designed to help you to sell your pictures.

By correctly titling, tagging (or key-wording) your stories AND pictures, your photographs will be far more visible, searchable, retrievable and hence purchasable for potential buyers.

By doing this correctly when you upload stories to Demotix, will not only help enormously to retrieve your pictures on the Demotix website itself, but also when we push your photographs to our distribution partners, so that image buyers can effectively search and find your images here too. It is too late to do this afterward, so please, think in these terms.

The help bubbles which pop out when you hover over a field in the edit area of upload are there to help you, so please follow the instructions.
Here’s an example of a perfect media summary, title, individually captioned and key-worded story;

http://www.demotix.com/news/356027/thomas-bjorn-wins-estoril-open-portugal

As you scroll through, you will see the media summary above the picture gives an overview of the event, and below the pictures, are the individual picture captions, which gives a far more precise summary of what is happening in the picture itself.

If you click on one of the rolling images, you are taken to an individual picture page. Here, you can see that the photographer has individually tagged the name of the golfer in the picture, as well as given the story other tags. This is the page image buyers usually land on.

Date:
•The date you input in the calendar pop-out is the date you took the pictures – NOT the date you upload to us.
•The date you write at the end of the media summary should match the date you input in the calendar area.
•Date in the long form - 14th August 2010
•Do not include dates in the captions.
•Please also take a moment to check your camera date settings are correct. We verify stories by using metadata, so if the date conflicts with the date you input, we will not be able to publish your work.
•If a set was taken over a period of time, input the last day of the shoot in the calendar area in the story section, write the period you took the pictures at the end of the media summary, (i.e. Nov 2009 – Jan 2010).

Title:
•Always make this as informative and to the point as possible – don’t be abstract.
Good title - 'Greeks protest over austerity measures - Athens'
•Please don’t use CAPSLOCK throughout the heading, but you can use capitalised words.
•When inputting the City at the end of the title, input a dash before-hand. 'Red Baron comes to town - San Diego'

Short Media Summary:
•Write your titles, media summary and story as if you know nothing about the topic. This means include background information and remember that in 6 months time, the story will be ’old’ news, so it needs to contain information that you may think is obvious now.
•Imagine the media summary as information taken from the beginning, middle and end of the Description.
•Always write in the present tense, i.e. ‘Football fans dance in the streets...’

So, always succinct and factual! - What happened?
Keep it;
o Short
o Relevant
o 100% Accurate
o Give Names
o No personal opinions here.
o End media summary with; ‘City, Country. Day, Month, Year (example: 7th July 2011)
o If the country or city appears in the title of your story or in the text of the media summary, there is no longer any need to repeat it at the end of the media
summary

- Example of a good media summary:
“Nearly 200 entrants compete in the first-ever Beard Team USA, National Beard and Moustache Championships in Bend. Oregon. 5th June 2010”

(See full set here – also has good picture captions; http://www.demotix.com/news/352372/national-beard-and-mustache-championships)

‘Captioning’ Tab:
1) Here, you are able to caption individual pictures within your set.
This is very important because picture buyers tend to search for pictures rather than stories.
So, write concisely what the image is showing (see set above)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/default.stm shows perfect examples of how to picture caption correctly.

2) By assigning specific keywords to an individual picture you will increase the chances of someone coming across yours.
Read the image and write what you see in it. Be literal - if there's a child in the picture, write 'child', 'afghan child' - if there's a poppy field in the distance add 'poppy field', 'opium'...
A recent example of a picture request from the BBC; ‘Pope wearing red shoes’. Therefore, write small details that you see in the image – it makes a difference!

3) And crucially, there is an ‘individuals’ field for which you must input the name of the person in the picture. For example, if you’ve taken a set of the Pope visiting a city and most of the shots are of the expectant crowd, but a few have the Pope himself in the pictures, write ‘Pope Benedict XVI’, 'The Pope', Ratzinger' etc (if there are multiple ways of phrasing one thing/person - include it) in the 'individual field' only in the pictures he’s in. i.e.:

Keywords:
•The easiest way to keyword, (or tag), your images is by lifting words and phrases from the title, media summary and story sections.
•Write multiple ways of phrasing the same thing, for example, ‘World Cup 2010’, could also be ‘FIFA World Cup 2010’, ’FIFA 2010’, ‘2010 World Cup’ etc. OR for ‘Greek austerity measures’, include-‘anti-government protest’, ‘against austerity measures’, ‘trade unionists march’..try also not to focus on the ANTI side of the story. Someone may be looking for 'Greek politics' or 'politicians in Greece' and may stumble on your work - which is the idea.
•Put yourself in picture buyers’ shoes and think about what they’d type into a search field box to come by your pictures.
•Think of the wider context – i.e. ‘Palestine Israel conflict ‘, Palestinian Israeli conflict’, ‘Arab Jewish hostility’ etc.
•Write phrases like; ‘mourning Palestinian women’, ‘Palestinian women crying’, ‘mourn’, 'death' 'dead palestinian'. Don't be shy or feel your being too disrespectful to the subject matter, when the potential story has a chance to make some change. Picture editors will key in almost specifically what they want for tomorrows news.
•Separate your keywords with commas before clicking ‘add’. (Semi-colons will NOT work).

Categories:
Please ensure you put your stories under the correct categories. You can choose a main category, but if your story spans political and business (work), then you can select this as your secondary category. Try to tick the most appropriate options.

If you feel the categories are missing options, please write to publishing [at] demotix.com

Good Luck!