Keywords help search engines find your photos so your admirers get to the good stuff faassst!
When you tag photos with a keyword like Hawaii, you can flaunt every photo you took in Hawaii, right on your homepage.
Note: The keywords section of your homepage starts off hidden, but you can choose to show it by clicking the "Homepage Layout" button on your homepage, and then checking "Top Keywords".
Gotchas: Only you, as the account owner, will be able to search for any keywords from unlisted or password-protected galleries. We only index the first 30 keywords for each photo. Keywords can take up to 24 hours to populate
Get your photos keyworded
- One at a time:
When you're logged in, you'll see a "keywords: add" link under the main image in SmugMug viewing style. Enter your keywords separated by spaces. To group them together you can separate the terms with a comma or enclose the term in quotes.
- In bulk:
Find the Tools Menu and choose Caption/Keyword. Look for that Quick Entry box at the top.
The rules are the same: Each word in your quick entry will be separated by commas. So add "sweet car" (with quotes) and you get sweet car as a keyword. Add just sweet car (without quotes) and you'll get two separate keywords. Remember that you can skip the quotes and just add a comma after each term if you prefer.
Tip: Don't forget to hit the Preview button after each Quick Entry!
- Before adding to SmugMug:
If you added keywords in a program like iPhoto or Photoshop before adding the photos to SmugMug, we'll do our best to find those and automatically apply them. Specifically, we look for keywords in the IPTC keywords field. Please note that keywords added on SmugMug do not get embedded in the IPTC data.
We also look at the filenames of your images. If your filename is "Alvin_Birthday3.jpg", for example, we'll add the keywords "Alvin" and "Birthday" automatically. If your filename is the common format of "IMG_1234.jpg" or "DSC_1234.jpg", etc., we'll ignore it. You can always enable or disable this feature in the Discovery tab of your Account Settings (under "Search").
I want details with examples!
We have a great page on the nitty gritty of keyword searching here on our wiki.
Here's a guide to how we interpret keywords:
Key points:
- Separate keywords with commas, colons, or enclose the group in quotes. We'll interpret them the same way.
- Any word that is a combination of letters and numbers are acceptable. We'll index the keyword exactly as you enter it.
- Self-standing numbers can be any length and will be indexed as keywords exactly as you enter them.
- 1 and 2-character English words, and common words such as and will be ignored unless you enclose them in quotes.
- 1 and 2-character non-English words are acceptable.
- Apostrophes, periods, and underscores are valid characters. However, slashes and hyphens are not and will be stripped from the keyword.
- If there is a space in your keyword, like "beautiful sunset", entering beautiful sunset in the search box will not return a handy keyword link. It will still return all photos that match the individual words, and you can always browse that keyword by clicking on your keyword cloud, or going straight to the URL: http://smugmug.com/keyword/beautiful sunset
Examples:
| You enter: |
You get: |
| Nova Scotia London |
nova |
scotia |
london |
| Nova Scotia, London |
nova scotia |
london |
|
| London2009 |
london2009 |
|
|
| london 2009 |
london |
2009 |
|
| 1st trip to London |
1st |
trip |
london |
| "1st trip" to London |
1st trip |
london |
|
| For London and Paris |
london |
paris |
|
| "London and Paris" |
london and paris |
|
|
| f/2.8 |
f2.8 |
|
|
Unleash the power of related keywords
If you tag a photo with two or more keywords, you give your admirers the power to drill down to just what they want.
Let's say your visitors saw the keyword "2004 Concours" on your homepage and clicked it. They'll be able to browse all 181 photos with that keyword: http://concours.smugmug.com/keyword/2004 concours.
If you're viewing in SmugMug viewing style, SmugMug serves up gorgeous cars and neat links, shown at right.
If your visitor is a Ferrari fiend, one click on +ferrari serves up every Ferrari featured in the 2004 Concours d'Elegance, including this beauty:
Gotcha: The related keywords will only show in SmugMug viewing style.
What about gallery keywords?
The Gallery Keywords box you see in your gallery settings is for hidden keywords to help people find that gallery when they search. You can include words that pertain to your gallery, but didn't get mentioned in the gallery title or description.
