Your image can only sell if it can be found. On Photofolio, search runs on titles, captions and keywords, and Google Images reads the same fields. Ten minutes of careful writing per shoot is the highest-return work in stock.

The title

One factual sentence, 8–15 words, describing what is in the frame: Female engineer checking cabling in a data centre aisle. No adjectives like ‘beautiful’, no keyword lists, no camera names.

The caption

One to three sentences adding what the title cannot: where, when, what is happening, who (in general terms if unreleased). A technician traces a patch lead in a colocation facility in Manchester. The image is model-released. This is what appears on the image page and in Google.

An office in the city. Business. A…A caucasian businesswoman working on a laptop…A woman seated at a desk holding…Two men at a table in a…

Keywords

• Aim for 15–40. Fewer than 10 and buyers will not find it; more than 50 and you are spamming.
• Start concrete: subject, action, setting, objects. Then location (town, region, country). Then concepts (teamwork, sustainability) — only where the image clearly shows them.
• Include the British and American spellings where they differ (colour/color, grey/gray).
• Add the technical descriptors buyers filter on: copy space, close-up, aerial view, silhouette, nobody.
• Never add keywords for things that are not in the picture. It kills conversion and gets images removed.

Things to avoid

‘No people’ as a keyword when there are people. Camera and lens names. Your own name as a keyword. Emotive words nobody searches for. Copying a rival’s keyword list.

Metadata travels

Write titles, captions and keywords into the file’s IPTC fields in Lightroom, Capture One or Bridge before you upload; we read them automatically and Google Images reads them too. Our importer preserves your credit and copyright fields.