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Captions and keywords...
I would like to thank all the contributors who have been sending in their work on CD, but I must ask that you all take care to fill in the captions and keywords correctly. As more material is submitted I have less and less time to spend on each set and less time to either correct errors or possibly notice if mistakes have been made. The most common fault with keywords is that the delimiters are left out, in effect this means a whole string of keywords will be treated as one single keyword by the system, since certain parts of the process will only support keywords of a limited length your carefully considered keywords may simply be deleted without me even seeing them! In Photoshop CSx you can enter keywords as a single string with commas or semi colons dividing them, in other programmes you might have an “Add” button you have to press after each entry (though pressing the “Enter” key usually has the same effect).
Where the caption is concerned the most frequent fault is basic lack of grammar. The caption appears on the web site exactly as you type it in the caption box, if it is all lower case (or all caps) or has no punctuation then frankly it looks shoddy. You may feel in these days of txt spk and instant messaging that it does not matter, but clients may want to use these captions so they must be right.
Please check on the scanning notes periodically, I make regular changes as new software appears and circumstances change.
Pass it on
If any Collections contributors have anything they would like us to include in newsletters then please let us know. It is not a regular mail out so please give us plenty of notice if it is tied to a specific date.
History
Some of the older of you probably have collections that date back to the sixties (and beyond?). Some of this will now be aquiring historical interest. As you may have read, Brian has been busy scanning a lot of his old material and getting it online so if any of you have old material that might be of interest and the means to digitise it, please let us know.
They would have to be obviously “historical” so landscapes may not be of so much interest, but towns, especially with people and anything to do with how we lived could be useful.
We would also be interested in portraits of well known people you might have photographed in the past and if any of you chronicled any kind of craft or such like.
What’s the point!?
An annoying side effect of working in the picture library business is you tend to read the credits on pictures in magazines and papers.
I was reading a magazine to which I subscribe last weekend and came across a picture that we could easily have supplied, indeed we have supplied them frequently in the past! As usual I had a look at the credit only to see it was by one of our own contributors but from another library. . . I found this quite depressing.
We don’t appear to have this particular picture on file, but it does highlight a serious flaw within the picture library industry. Photographers seem to believe that these days it is OK to supply essentially the same material to multiple libraries (if not actually the same material). On top of this several libraries sub licence their collections to other libraries so in the end everybody is trying to sell exactly the same picture and the clients are simply going to go for the cheapest. With the larger publishers this tends to mean whoever they have done a deal with, the “all you can eat” model, which means you photographers end up with 50% of not very much. Then there are the deals for educational use, one of our biggest markets, where pictures are sold for as little as £5 and I have heard of some libraries now offering contributors a mere 25% (and half that for use via foreign subsidiaries) so you are going to end up getting usage statements with fees you couldn’t buy a pint of milk for.
As long as the general libraries continue to reduce themselves to a homogenous mush the prices paid for pictures will continue to fall and the percentages passed on to contributors will keep reducing. So think about it before blasting the same stuff off to half a dozen different libraries.
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