Shutterstock Photographer Forum :: View topic

comosaydice · Joined: 11 May 2008 Posts: 69

I'm not sure exactly what the solution is, but shutterstock's search is the worst of any stock site I've used.

Search by category is good, as is orientation, but the burying of photos which actually fit keywords is horrible. My suggestion would be to make it so that the order in which keywords are entered to a photo has weight. So that if the main subject of a photo is sunburn, you enter that word first, and when a customer searches for the word sunburn, the first images they see are the highest rated images directly relating to that keyword.

Another option would be to have the images title and or description play a role in search results as well. Generally speaking for stock photos the subject of the photo should be in the title, these are not artistic shots.

When searching for sunburn, the first page of results when set to 10 rows by most popular image shows 60 images. Out of the 60 images only 9 images actually depict a person with a sunburn. 8 of these 9 contain the word sunburn in the title, while 1 uses sunburnt instead. 2 results contain the word sunburn in the title without having an actual photo of sunburn, but are at least directly related, applying sunscreen to prevent sunburn.

9 out of 60 is horrible, there should be some form of weight for keywords so that buyers can pull up images they need quickly and easily, and so that sellers images don't get buried by unrelevant ones.