Photoclubalpha

I have posted a couple of orchid shots on Alamy and am thinking of adding more but I can't identify them. It occurs to me that this lack of precision may mean they never turn up in a keyword search and I may, therefore, be wasting my time. On the other hand I don't imagine there are that many photo buyers who know the full botanical names. Anyone got any thoughts?

I suppose if I was using the shot in a text book or botany magazine I would search by the scientific name and catagory

Yes, we have not so far sold an identified orchid shot and we have many - but we just sold a completely unidentified orchid taken by our daughter, too close-up to be correct as a botanical shot (cropped into the flower). Second such shot of hers to sell, the more accurate and captioned/identified shots with space all round, full stem and flower shown, which we took great care on have never so sold any. But then again they may in future. I can only say that just being identified as an 'an orchid' has not prevent two sales for Ailsa's shots.

David

Very interesting, David, thank you very much. I have to say I find the whole issue of key words on Alamy, with descending orders of relevance, hard to fathom. I consider myself pretty articulate but there are limits to the number of relevant keywords for most subjects I can think of apart from one or two politicians, for whom my lexicon knows no bounds

Actually the essential etc fields make no difference. Many of my images have most of their keywords in the comprehensive field, carried over from before they introduced the tiered system. I did not always copy the best possible keywords into the earlier fields, I just used some spreadsheet operations. Doesn't seem to matter, searches find the comprehensive field as easily as any other.

David