Pixiq

Spending time inputting keywords to the metadata has to be one of the least exciting aspects of working with digital images. Yet, this is the key to how other people find your images. I do just this many times a day on my Natural Visions site – either to compile a digital lightbox to send to clients or to find images to illustrate my own articles, books and posts.  More recently, I have also been compiling lightboxes to see the flow of images for PowerPoint presentations. 

The idea for this post occurred late one night, when just for fun I searched for pig face and animal sculptures and within a few seconds, I had enough images to select a few for this post. This just goes to prove that when done thoroughly, keywording is a brilliant tool.

Once images are in a lightbox I can save a lot of time by downloading them directly from my website into a folder labelled with the name of the post within a PIXIQ folder, without having to hunt through master archives.

I don't know anything about the dynamics of melting icebergs, but I do know that I have seen duck-shaped remnants of icebergs several times.

You cannot set out in search of natural animal sculptures. These were taken as I stumbled upon them over many years in four different countries. Only the elephant rock has been used before – in a kids magazine. Now a couple of keywords have brought them together to illustrate a common topic. That is the fun thing about digital images – the greater the number of relevant keywords, the more options becomes available to create distinct collections. 

Searching simply for animal on our site is hopeless – you currently end up with 23,562 images! But by adding additional keywords such as China or aquatic narrows the field considerably.

Has anyone come across other natural animal sculptures?

I'm just off to do some more keywording!