After downloading and installing the Alamy plugin for Lightroom, I quickly realised that I’d have to organise my keywords into a hierarchy (always have to spell check that word). As pretty much all my photos are building/architecture related I set up the hierarchy as I would doing a 3D model, discipline, element, feature etc. The logical physical elements went fairly easily but the difficulty came trying to sort adjectives and nouns into sensible categories. I did what I could but I’m sure a more logical structure will present itself the more and more I use it. I hope. It took about three evenings and I managed to clean up some near duplicates so at least I had some consistency.

I had 94 images already uploaded and QC passed on Alamy so I went through each image and added missing keywords and some descriptive stuff, photo classification etc. So far the workflow I’m using is adding all the keywords using the hierarchy then manually typing in the Essential and Main keywords as required by Alamy. Initially I wondered why you couldn’t add those special keywords via the hierarchy panel but by having to type them in, you think more about what’s important and unique about each image. There is an option on the plugin export to automatically fill the Essential and Main keyword boxes but you really need full control over what the search engine considers important.

I did twenty yesterday and the remaining 74 during the course of today and I’ve gone video blind, my eyes feel like furry hard boiled eggs.

The Alamy Lightroom plugin can be found here, looks tricky on first inspection but a couple of read throughs of the pdf manual (which doesn’t seem to be in usage order, hence the double read through) and 15 mins of use and everything should click in place.