Review: MarineLife Keywords

Alex Mustard · Issue 50, Sep/Oct 2009 · pp. 59–63

Products mentioned: MarineLife Keyword List (MLKL), Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture

Review: MarineLife Keywords by Alex Mustard Keywords are the way that searches find our images. This can be the search engine within our own image catalogue, Google on the internet or the search facility in a stock photo agency. They all work with the same keywords, which are stored in the image metadata in a format that has been standardised since the early 1990s by the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council). It is a system that works well. The only real downside is that there are few more laborious and mind-numbing tasks in underwater photography than typing in a series of keywords for a picture. Some metadata, like our camera settings are generated automatically by our camera, but keywords must be typed in manually. It may only take a minute for an individual shot, but it soon adds up. The most taxing keywords to do are the species names, which have to be checked letter…