Keywords help search engines find your photos so your admirers get to the good stuff faassst!
When you tag photos with keywords like London, you can flaunt every London photo you tagged, right on your homepage:
Note: The keywords section of your homepage lives in your Control Panel until you move it to your homepage.
Gotcha: Only you, as the account owner, will be able to search for any keywords from unlisted or password-protected galleries.
Tell me how to add and edit keywords
Single photo
When you're logged in, you'll see an "keywords: add" link under the main image in SmugMug viewing style. Click it and you'll be able to fill in keywords to your heart's content.
The rules
Entering sweet car without quotations places two keywords on your home page: sweet and car. But "sweet car" creates one.
Words beginning with numbers will be ignored unless you enclose them in quotes. Words ending in numbers will have the numbers removed unless the word is enclosed in quotes. 1 and 2-character words, and common words such as and are also ignored unless you enclose them in quotes.
Examples:
| You enter: |
You get: |
| New York London |
new |
york |
london |
| "New York" London |
new york |
london |
|
| London2005 |
london |
|
|
| "London2005" |
london2005 |
|
|
| london "2005" |
london |
2005 |
|
| 2005London |
|
|
|
| 1st trip to London |
trip |
london |
|
| "1st trip" to London |
1st trip |
london |
|
| For London and Paris |
london |
paris |
|
| "London and Paris" |
london and paris |
|
|
It's better in bulk
Find the Photo Tools Menu and choose the Edit Captions/Keywords photo tool. Look for that Quick Entry box at the top.
The rules are a bit different with Quick Entry. Every quick entry you add will be enclosed in quotes. So add sweet car and you get "sweet car" as a keyword. Add sweet then add car and you'll get two separate keywords.
Gotcha: Only the first 15 keywords you enter for a photo will be indexed by SmugMug's search.
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.
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 "IMG_23987234.jpg", we'll ignore it.
Q: Why don't you use gallery titles and photo captions as keywords?
A: The guiding concept is keywords classify while captions describe. They often contain extra words that describe but don't classify, cluttering your home page with words that don't take your fans to interesting photos.
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.
