With so many offline and online stock agencies, you would think that finding the best stock images would be a walk in the park. On the contrary, it has become much more time-consuming as most brand managers find it difficult to sift through the zillions of possible hits. More isn’t always a great thing, as it seems in this case that advertising specialists, brand managers, and business owners looking for the best images that represent their businesses have to sift through countless images to find the one that’s best for them.
With most stock agencies’ image libraries running into millions, finding the images that truly represent their business has become time-consuming. You need to up your game when looking for images most likely to represent your brand and your communications. But how exactly can you do this?
Leverage the search option
Every stock website has a searchable database of images. The search box allows you to search for images using keywords. It’s a standard thing that we all use on an everyday basis. But you can incorporate a few subtle changes to help you leverage the search option better.
For example, you can use long-tail keywords to search for images. Say you’re looking for a group of people with mixed ethnicities sitting around a table. Don’t use “broad” keywords like a group of people sitting. Instead, use a long-tail keyword like “mixed ethnicity group seated around a table” or a “group of people with diverse ethnicities sitting” and any variations thereof.
The longer the keyword, the more targeted the search will be, and the more filtered the search results. This prevents you from having to sift through hundreds and thousands of images irrelevant to your purpose.
Most stock photo websites have an advanced search option. This allows you to refine your search further. By all means, use this if you find a general long-tail keyword-based search still returns many irrelevant results.
Alternatively, you can use a broad search term instead of a long-tail keyword and then use the refinement options to narrow the results.
What are the refinements that you can make?
You can make many refinements, including the number of people (one or more) to be in your images, the orientation of the images, and the style of the images (high-key, low-key) that can give you more refined results.
