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Image Search

Overview

Images that you upload are not publicly searchable by default. You must explicitly make images searchable to the public. In other words, making a gallery public does not automatically make its images searchable.

Images that are made searchable are available in near real time. This means that in some cases there is a slight delay from the moment you make an image searchable to when the public can actually find that image in a search result.

Making Images publicly searchable

From the Archive Browser:
  • Select a folder to view the images within that folder
  • Select one or many thumbnails by clicking in the gray area around the image, or use the "Select: Viewable All None" links above the thumbnails
  • Click the Edit button -> Make Searchable
  • Publicly searchable images are denoted with a blue circle and magnifying glass icon.

From the Archive List:
  • Click on a folder name to view its contents
  • Select one or many thumbnails by clicking the checkbox, or using the "Select: Viewable All None" links above the thumbnails
  • Click the "Pub Searchable/Released" batch action on the right of the screen.
  • Publicly searchable images are denoted with a blue circle and magnifying glass icon.

From the Gallery List:
  • Click on a gallery to view its contents
  • Select one or many thumbnails by clicking the checkbox, or using the "Select: Viewable All None" links above the thumbnails
  • Click the "Publicly Searchable" batch action on the right of the screen.
  • Publicly searchable images are denoted with a blue circle and magnifying glass icon.

How does the public search work?

When you make an image publicly searchable, the image is updated to multiple search databases. Often the process is nearly instantaneous, but if our servers are working to update a very large number of images at once, it's possible that your images won't be available for a few minutes (or longer in some extreme cases).

Which fields are searchable?

The following fields are indexed for a keyword search (if you have designated the image as publicly searchable):
  • IPTC Title
  • IPTC Keywords
  • IPTC Description/Caption
  • IPTC Country
  • IPTC Country ISO
  • IPTC State
  • IPTC City
  • Photographer First and Last Name (i.e. the name you specified here)
A note on country searching: As of May 22, 2010, our search engine indexes both IPTC Country and Country ISO fields. This means that when a buyer chooses a country from the drop-down menu in an advanced search, our search engine will return matches for that country in either of those two IPTC fields. Prior to May 22, 2010, only IPTC Country ISO was indexed.

All of the above applies to all search realms:

  • Your homepage
  • The http://www.photoshelter.com global search
  • Your internal search (When logged into the Photographer Area, you may search through your entire archive - publicly searchable and private images - using this form)

Do I have to put keywords for plurals, verb tenses, etc?

Generally, you do NOT need to put in these redundant keywords separately. The following cases are handled automatically by PhotoShelter:
  • Plural: e.g. "girl" and "girls"
  • Non-irregular verb tense: e.g. "consign" and "consigned," but not "swim" and "swam"
  • Nominalization: e.g. "investigate" and "investigation"
We also index unstemmed forms of words, which means that if you perform the following search:
  • celebrity -celebrates -celebrations
you will be able to find celebrity images without also getting images, for example, of non-celebrity parties.

We use the Porter2 English stemming algorithm, which is a formulaic (non-brute force, non-dictionary-based) method devised to handle the aforementioned types of exceptions. The Porter2 algorithm is the most widely used stemming algorithm, so you can expect the search result fidelity for stemmed words to be on par with other major search engines.

Is the public search an "AND" or "OR" search?

PhotoShelter supports both AND and OR searches. The "basic" search found on our homepage and (optionally) on your website is an expansive "or" search that returns results with all matching words. For example:
A photographer has two images with the following keywords:
  1. Vince Carter
  2. Vince Young
Searching for "Vince", "Vince Carter" or "Vince Young" will return both of the images in the search results.
The default "Advanced Search" on the other hand offers the more accurate "and" search requiring both words to be present providing the most precise result. For example:
A photographer has three images with the following keywords:
  1. Vince Carter
  2. Vince Young
  3. Jimmy Carter
Searching for "Vince Carter" will only give you image results for Vince Carter ignoring the photos of Vince Young and Jimmy Carter because they are not the precise search term.

How does the date searching work?

When you upload an image, PhotoShelter looks at the following fields in order of precedence:
  • IPTC Creation Date
  • EXIF Creation Date (0x9003)
  • Upload Date
If there is no IPTC Creation Date, PhotoShelter uses EXIF. If there is no EXIF, PhotoShelter uses the time/date that you upload the image. You can always override the date by populating the IPTC Creation Date field.

Tell me about searching by orientation (portrait, landscape, square, panoramic)

The Advanced Image Search allows users to search for image based on its orientation. PhotoShelter automatically calculates the orientation based on the width and height of the image. Square images are any images that have a height and width that are within 2% of each other. Panoramic images are any image where the width is greater than or equal to 2.5 times the height.

The IPTC Creation Date field requires a month and day. What if I only know the month?

You should enter the 1st of the month as the date in order for the image to be returned in the largest number of searches. PhotoShelter enforces the Creation Date to be a valid date. Therefore, it must have a month, day and year.

I want to search for images based on when I uploaded them to PhotoShelter

If you would like to specifically search for images by the date they were added to PhotoShelter, use the 'Upload date range' fields in your archive search. Each image you upload automatically has this date associated with it.