1. What does Annotator do?
2. What makes Annotator different?
3. What is the workflow with Annotator?
4. How do I export the annotations I have generated?
5. Does Annotator work on a Mac?
6. Do you support IPTC?
7. Do you support XMP?
8. How do I generate low-res images for upload?
9. Why would I use the Adobe Bridge plugin?
10. Can I download and use any of the vocabularies at home?
11. Is technical support available?
12. Are agency memberships available?

Annotator is a web-based service for rapidly generating keywords for successful marketing and sale of images through stock photography agencies.

imense® has developed Annotator in tandem with photographers and professional keyworders to remove large amounts of the overhead associated with keywording and help get to the keywords that will sell the images. Annotator offers the use of three vocabularies:

The imense® Commercial Vocabulary:

This is a vocabulary that can be used to make keyword suggestions given one or more initial words. For example, the word 'tree' may be associated with 'forest', 'copse', 'park', 'landscape', 'greenery' etc. These associations can help a keyworder cover more of the terms likely to be used to search for an image than just 'tree'.

A self-generated custom Word Hotlist:

Users may associate a single word like 'smile' with a series of words like 'smile, smiles, smiling, happy, grin, joy' in order to save typing while covering a keyword area.

The imense® Controlled Vocabulary:

This contains a hierarchy of terms that may help you arrive at the words you need to describe something.

Annotator also uses a range of new technology developed by imense® to automatically recognize visual content in a user's images and turn this into keywords.

Upload your images individually or as a ZIP archive. Then Annotator provides you thumbnails and a convenient web-based interface for generating keywords and other metadata for your images. Annotator automatically labels whether your images are cut-outs; color or black & white; the location of copy space (if present); and how many people are in the image, together with their age ranges, sex, and ethnicity.

You can then apply captions to your images and the imense® vocabularies will suggest additional keywords that may help the marketing of your images. You can of course add further keywords or amend the automatic annotation.

Annotator also extracts any existing metadata embedded in your image headers (EXIF, IPTC, and XMP), like Caption, Short Description, and existing keywords, to use as an initial seed for more comprehensive annotation.

See the Help page for more detail, including some time-saving tips.

Annotator subscribers can either embed their keywords directly in their images as XMP and IPTC metadata or export all annotations as a spreadsheet or CSV file for supplying to stock photography agencies.

Annotator subscribers can automatically export their metadata into the formats required by these libraries:

• Age Fotostock
• Alamy
• Corbis
• Getty

For Alamy submitters, Annotator automatically splits your relevance-sorted keywords into Alamy's 'essential', 'main', and 'comprehensive' keyword fields, obeying Alamy's character limits.

In addition, lots of messy agency-specific requirements are handled automatically:

• People terms (whether "nobody" or "no people" or "none", ...)
• Release terminology (whether Yes/No, MR/NA, "Model and Property Released (MR&PR)", ...)
• Color (whether "Sepia" or just "Black & White")
• Field names and order (whether "Caption" or "Headline", "Visual Color" or "Color Appearance", ...)
• Formatting details (keyword separators, whether to separate CSV fields by tabs, semicolons, etc., and multi-word quoting rules)

Yes. Annotator is web-based and works in any modern browser, including Safari. In addition, the XMP / IPTC embedding applet works under Java in OS X (and also Windows and Linux).

Yes. Annotator automatically imports any IPTC headers in your images upon upload. You can use these as a seed for more comprehensive keywording by simply clicking the search icon.

Annotator can also embed your keywords into your high-res images as IPTC headers. This requires your browser to support Java. Find out more.

Yes. Annotator automatically imports any XMP headers in your images upon upload. The embedding feature also now supports XMP.

The easiest way is to use an action in Photoshop. Simply record an action that downsizes a copy set of the hi-res images, which you can then zip and upload to Annotator.

You can also do this in Adobe Bridge, by choosing Tools | Photoshop | Batch (or Image Processor).

Other software that does batch resizing includes irfanView and Image Resizer from Windows Powertoys. Canon users can also use Digital Photo Professional.

This plugin is for users of Adobe CS4 who wish to save time by bypassing the need to upload images to the imense® Annotator platform. The Annotator plugin for Adobe Bridge will embed keywords within your image files as XMP. It does not support the full range of Annotator functionality, such as agency exports and auto-keywording.

As a subscriber to any version of Annotator you can download the latest version of the imense® Controlled Vocabulary, subject to our terms and conditions.

The imense® Commercial Vocabulary is not available for download.

Yes, technical support is available to all subscribers through email to support@imense.com.

Yes. Multiple accounts can be generated for an agency wishing to have its photographers use a standard annotation generation tool. To find out more, contact sales@imense.com.