Life Spy

With the global decline is media due to advertising budgets being cut, it is no surprise that many photographers are finding that commissions are becoming harder to get. This has meant that freelancers have started to look more at the photography stock as a way of earning additional income to fill the gap.

But selling stock is a bit of a mine field when you start as your images have to have keywords (tags) so search engines can find your images and this keywording is a skill in its own right; well it is if you want to sell the image.

You can obviously get some one to do it for you but this costs, it also takes time and in a recession you need to taking care of clients, finding assignments and not keywording hundreds of photos.

There is help though, if not in a scary way from Imense and there Annotator which can read the image and add the relevant keywords, so why is it scary? Well it is surprising to see that a computer/software can pick out how many people are in a picture, decide on their ethnicity read the background and the list goes on, this is a technology that will probably get better in the future and has obvious surveillance applications in addition to being a photographers tool.

Although I have not tried the system I did think it was a tad pricey as the top level package is the one that is needed and at the moment the pound is week against the dollar, so is costing a lot more than normal…result of the recession.