Introduction
If you have ever had a project that needs content depicting specific locations you will have likely felt first hand how challenging this can be. Finding content for well known locations can be straight forward but if you need content of niche locations, it can be a real challenge. This article explores the difficulties in finding content for specific locations and sites that offer features that give you the best chance at finding the content you need.
Challenge One: Finding Platforms with Specific Features
You might have tried using google to search for queries like ‘search via map for stock photos’ in the vain attempt to find which micro-stock companies allow you to search for images on a map. You would have quickly found that none of the top results will be any help. The results only show links to images of maps from sites like Shutterstock and GettyImages. This is a regular issue with trying to find information on the different stock sites and is one of the reasons we started StockedMedia.
Challenge Two: Irrelevant Results
Searching for locations with a text based search will normally bring irrelevant results. We have had a project which highlighted how bad this issue can be. We needed images of Shell Beach, which is a beach in Australia. It shouldn’t be surprising to know that there are a lot of beaches tagged with ‘Shell’ and ‘Beach’ and even including ‘Australia’ in the search string results in a lot of content that wasn’t suitable. The more irrelevant results that are shown, the longer it takes to find the content you need. What is even worse is that these irrelevant results can result in you accidentally buying content that isn’t actually showing what you need it to show.
Challenge Three: Poor Tagging
Many content authors tag stock photos and videos with labels that relate to what is in the image rather than where it was taken. This means that searching for tags that relate to the location can miss content. In the past we have found images that we liked but we needed to know the location before it could be used. This is one area where reverse image search can help.
Challenge Four: Lack of GPS information
Not all content has been tagged with GPS coordinates in its metadata. This means that any element that doesn’t have this information cannot be returned with features that need it. Luckily more and more cameras have built in GPS technology so it is getting easier to find content with this metadata. If you are sell photos through sites like Dreamstime and GettyImages, think about making sure your content includes this data.
Location Filters
Several sites allow you to filter search results with a location. These location filters can be a little limited in their suitability as they typically allow to only filter content by country. While this can narrow down the results, it doesn’t offer the specificity that might be needed.
Search with a Map
For some this might seem like an obvious feature, so it might be surprising to know that we have only found a single company that has the ability to search for content using a map. Dreamstime’s implementation of a map search might not be perfect but the fact that there is no competition does make it worth a try. There are a few frustrations to Dreamstime’s map search interface, one of which is how slow and slugging it can feel when using it. We have however, successfully used this to find images that we wouldn’t have been able to find without this feature.
Search Using Coordinates
One of the best implementations of searching for content by location is from Flickr. They provide the ability to enter in GPS coordinates and set a search radius. While you might need to find the coordinates that you are after this is easy to do through a quick google search.
