Yesterday I had an enquiry from a client who wants to buy one of my images. He is very keen to buy, but before doing so had a couple of questions he wanted answers for.
I recognised the image immediately and can even remember taking it at the time. However, in order to give hime the answers he wanted, I needed to find the original in my archive. No mean feat especially when you consider the number of images it contains. For instance, last year alone I shot over 9,500 images and I’m easily going to exceed that this year.
Believe it or not, finding the image literally took seconds. This was wholly down to the fact I had invested the time keywording it at the time I developed it. The keywords are stored in the meta data of the image so a quick search in Bridge found the image in about 5 seconds. I dread to think how long it would have taken to find if I had had to do it manually. Especially as I originally thought I’d taken it in 2007, not as it turned out in 2006. I would have been looking in the wrong place and most likely come to the conclusion that I’d deleted it by mistake or lost it when my disk crashed last year.
The key takeaway from this story is that it is definitely worth taking the extra time to keyword your images when you upload them from the camera or flash card. By doing so you can and will save time later on and maybe even make rather than lose a sale as a result.
Best regards
Gavin
Update…
It is definitely worth being able to react and respond to a client’s request quickly. The image that this post relates to was bought by the client a couple of days ago, almost 2 months after the request. That might seem a long time, but I have had a 6 month lead time on some images.
Best regards,
Gavin