Tagging.tech interview with Avinash Jain

Tagging.tech presents an audio interview with Avinash Jain about keywording services

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Henrik de Gyor:  This is Tagging.tech. I am Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Avinash Jain. Avinash, how are you?

Avinash Jain:  Good, how are you doing?

Henrik:  Good. Avinash, who are you and what do you do?

Avinash:  As you said, my name is Avinash Jain. I am the Founder and CEO of KeyIndia Graphics. We do keywording, retouching, video editing services for clients all over the world, in fact.

Henrik:  Avinash, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with keywording services?

Avinash:  We’ve been doing this for 14 years. We’ve seen the keywording services domain sticking to the old way of still doing the manual keywording, but in the last four or five years we’ve seen a lot of good services come on board with technologies where it would really help us expedite keywording.

The challenges in the initial stages when I started this business were to train people as per high-quality standards. This challenge remained the same for the last 10, 12 years. The success has been…You have the right people who will do the keywording for you then you are in good shape. If not, then these keywords can be all over the place. A good keyword is like your best salesperson.

If you don’t have a good keyword, or too many keywords, then you can go all over the place. Now, we’ve started seeing, with the tagging services coming on board, quicker services which we can use in our internal workflow, is really helping our people expedite the entire process.

Henrik:  Avinash, as of March 2016, how much of the keywording work is completed by people versus machines?

Avinash:  It is still a hybrid solution. We haven’t found a solution where only machines are able to do the job because most of the clients do require high quality work. Compared to machines we’ve tried in the past, it does probably 50 percent of the job.

Still, somebody has to go in and look at it, and maybe delete the bad keywords, add proper keywords to it. There’s still quite amount, I would say 60–65 percent of the time, keywords which come out of a machine need to be rechecked again and again by experts.

Henrik:  Avinash, what advice would you like to share with people looking into keywording services?

Avinash:  The first important thing is to identify your internal workflow and who are you going to submit these images to. If it is going to be, example, Getty Images, then you want to keyword as per their style. Everybody, every other stock agency, has their own guidelines that they want to use in their keywording services.

First, is to identify what kind of keywords you are looking for. Then make a road map or a guideline to identify what keywords are required in your system. Secondly, identify, do you want keywords in Excel sheet? In IPTC? Do you want keywords to be done on your own site?

Once all these initial challenges are taken cared of, then it becomes much easier for any keywording company or services to go in and start keywording. A standardization has to be done much before, than actually started keywording.

You don’t want keywording one standard, and all of a sudden, after 10,000, 20,000 images down the road, you’d realize you’re not doing the right standard. The initial guideline has to be done correctly.

Henrik:  Avinash, where can we find more information about keywording services?

Avinash:  You could go to our site, keyindiagraphics.com, but if you Google keywording, keywording services, if you Google keywording tags, or if you Google keywording IPTC metadata information online, you’ll find quite a bit of information. It’s very easy to find out. Anybody who’s starting out to keyword those images should actually do all that research online.

Henrik:  Well, thanks Avinash.

Avinash:  Well, thank you. Thanks for the interview.

Henrik:  For more on this, visit Tagging.tech.

Thanks again.

For a book about this, visit keywordingnow.com

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