Introducing the fotoKeyword Harvester

Over twenty years ago I started writing software for photographers. One of the biggest problems at the time was that images were not getting out to market because photographers had such a backlog of slides waiting to be captioned. So I wrote the Cradoc CaptionWriter, a slide labeling program that got millions of slides off photographer’s desks, and into the market place, where they could make money.

Since then I’ve written other software programs to solve the problems I’ve been faced with in my own photography business; how to get paid fairly for my work, how to negotiate the best deal, how to get the necessary paperwork out, how to protect my copyright, and how to organize my digital images.

Now, the biggest problem facing photographers is almost the same as it was twenty years ago. Images are not getting to market because of the backlog with keywording, the digital equivalent of labeling slides.

Last year when I started to keyword thousands of my own images to submit to an agency, I was overwhelmed by the process of looking at a blank screen every time I started to keyword a new image. In a few hours I was fried. I needed help.

I went to the Internet to see if I could find any kind of solution that would help speed up the process, but there was nothing that suited my needs. There were a few programs, but they all basically presented that blank page every time I had a new image to keyword. As with other software programs I’ve written, I needed to come up with my own solution, because no one else had solved the problem.

I decided to search for images similar to mine on the Internet, and looked at the words that were being used to describe them. I also searched in Wikipedia for location details. I searched in Google to check the spelling of towns and cities. I checked an on-line thesaurus.

I tried to think like a photo buyer, or image researcher, and I soon realized through this process that I had to learn the language of keywording, a language that photo buyers already know since they constantly search for images, and have to refine the words they use to get the results they want.

I started to gather together all the words and phrases I found in my research to help me keyword my photos, but I couldn’t use them without taking even more time and effort to edit them down to keywords. I wanted a way to automate that process. I wanted to click a button and have everything done for me automatically.

Then I wanted to use the work I had already done when I needed to keyword similar images in the future. That’s when I started to write the fotoKeyword Harvester. The fotoKeyword Harvester is a very unique program; different than anything that has ever been done before for keywording.

The fotoKeyword Harvester has solved my keywording problems. It has made the job of keywording images easy, efficient and a bit more fun. If you do a bad job keywording your images they probably will never be seen again. So take the time to do a good, careful job keywording your images, make some money, and enjoy your photography.

To learn more about the fotoKeyword Harvester have a listen to a short audio description of the problems that need to be solved when keywording images. There is also a short video where I demonstrate how the fotoKeyword Harvester is the solution to those problems. And you can download the pdf of the Quick Start Guide that takes you step-by-step through the Harvester’s keywording process. These can all be found on fotoKeyword Harvester Tutorials page.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out.

Cradoc