How to Keyword Photos So You Can Find Them Two Years Later

Open the photo’s properties. Find the box marked Keywords or Tags. Type your terms, one after another, then save. That is how you keyword photos on any machine you own.

Nothing on the web will read what you just typed. Google will not. Your website probably will not either.

So most people stop bothering. That is the wrong lesson to draw from a field nobody scores. The keyword field is not a ranking signal at all. It is a retrieval system. Also the one place in image work where being thorough costs you absolutely nothing.

Where the Keyword Field Actually Lives

Right-click a JPEG in Windows. Properties, then Details. The box is labelled Tags. Type in there and Windows writes the terms into the file itself.

PNG files usually refuse. That is a format limitation rather than a Windows one.

Adobe Bridge gives you a proper keyword panel of its own. Lightroom Classic does too. Its version handles hierarchy, so Calgary can sit underneath Alberta and both get applied with one click.

Free options exist as well. XnView MP. digiKam. Or ExifTool, for anyone comfortable at a command line.

exiftool -keywords="hail damage" job-4412.jpg

All of them write to the same destination. IPTC keywords, mirrored into XMP. One metadata standard underneath, several front doors on top.

Google Never Reads It. That Is the Point.

Here is the objection, and it is a fair one. No search engine reads that field, so why fill it in.

Correct on the first half. Google’s own image guidance asks for descriptive file names. For alt text. Also for the words sitting around the picture on the page. The keyword field appears nowhere in any of it.

Now notice what that actually buys you.

Your alt text has to read like a sentence a person would hear out loud. Fifteen words, give or take. Cram forty terms in there and you are keyword stuffing, plainly.

The keyword field carries no such ceiling. Nobody is scoring it. Forty terms go in without a single consequence.

That is the trade sitting underneath this whole exercise. One field gets judged and must stay short. The other is invisible and can hold everything you know about the photograph.

What Actually Goes in the Keyword Field

Write what the photo shows. Then write what it is evidence of.

A roof. Shingles. Hail damage. Asphalt shingle replacement. Northwest Calgary. Job 4412. October. Pre-repair shot.

Notice what is absent from that. No adjectives about how nice the light was. Camera settings are pointless too, since the file already stores those on its own.

Also no marketing language. Nobody has ever searched their own archive for quality workmanship.

Search terms are the goal instead. Words your future self will genuinely type when a client phones asking for the hail photos from that October.

Ten to fifteen per image tends to be enough. Go under five and you end up scrolling rather than searching.

Two Names for One Thing Splits the Library

Here is the failure that quietly kills most photo libraries.

One person types storefront. Somebody else types shop front. Six months later a search for either one returns roughly half the pictures.

Nobody notices, naturally. The search returned results. Results look like success.

So write the list before you write the keywords. One agreed term per concept, parked somewhere everybody can see it.

Lightroom enforces this on its own. Start typing and it offers back what already exists in your list. That autocomplete is quietly the most valuable thing in the panel.

Everywhere else you enforce it yourself. A text file on the shared drive does the job.

The Field Rarely Survives the Upload

Now for the part that decides how you should think about all of this.

Plenty of platforms strip metadata during upload. Resizing tools frequently drop it too. Your original keeps the keywords. The copy served to visitors may well not.

Do not take my word for that. Upload one keyworded photo to your own site. Then right-click the image on the live page. Save it somewhere. Open the properties.

Look for your terms. Sometimes they survive. Often they are simply gone.

Either way the answer stays the same. You keyword the master file. Whatever the platform does downstream is the platform’s business, not yours.

Keyword Photos Once. Write the Alt Text Later.

So the payoff arrives at the moment of publishing rather than after it.

Picture the usual scene. Four in the afternoon. Twelve photos to attach to a page. You cannot remember which street the third one was shot on.

So the alt text becomes roofing work. Twelve times over.

Keyworded files delete that whole problem. Open the file. Read the terms. Write the sentence. Suddenly the alt text is transcription instead of invention.

Same story with the file name. hail-damage-shingles-nw-calgary.jpg comes straight off the keyword list. It never gets improvised under time pressure at the end of a long day.

That is the real mechanism here. The keyword field ranks nothing. Yet it supplies the raw material for the two things that do get read.

Proper keyword research works the same way, incidentally. You decide the vocabulary once, away from the page. Then everything downstream is assembly.

Somebody Will Say Their Phone Already Does This

And in a sense it does. Modern phone galleries recognise faces and beaches and dogs without anyone asking them to.

That recognition lives inside the app, though. Never inside the file.

Move the photo to a hard drive and the labels stay behind. Send it to a designer instead. They receive a picture with no terms attached to it whatsoever.

Finder tags on a Mac behave much the same way. The colour and the word live in the filesystem. Copy that file to a Windows machine and both disappear.

Embedded keywords travel. There is the whole distinction. The terms ride inside the file, so they arrive wherever the file arrives.

Worth testing on your own setup before trusting either one.

What To-The-TOP! Puts in a Client’s Keyword Field

Service vocabulary first. The words the business actually sells under, not the words the photographer would choose.

SEO Company To-The-TOP! has been doing this for Alberta and BC clients since 2007. The keyword list for a trade gets built once. Then every later shoot inherits it.

That list then has a second life. It becomes the vocabulary for page copy. Then for alt text. Later still for the ad groups in Google Ads management, where the same terms decide what a click costs.

Solo practitioner here, so the list carries forward rather than getting rebuilt by whoever happens to be free that week. Nineteen years of Calgary SEO work and the first move with a client’s photo library has not changed. Name things once, properly. That is a To-The-TOP! habit older than most of the tools.

Clients on the SEO services side are frequently surprised by that. Plenty of the site copy comes back out of one column of terms.

Common Questions About How to Keyword Photos

Do photo keywords help SEO?

Not directly. No search engine ranks a page on the keyword field buried inside an image file. What helps is the alt text and the file name you write from those keywords afterwards. Search engines do read both of those.

How many keywords should I add to a photo?

Ten to fifteen covers most business photography. Aim for terms you would genuinely type into a search box yourself. Padding the field costs nothing technically, though it does make your own searches noisier over time.

Where are photo keywords stored?

Inside the file, in the IPTC block, mirrored into XMP. That is why they survive a copy to another computer. App-level labels and Finder tags do not travel that way.

One thing worth checking before you keyword a whole archive. Pick a single file. Add two terms. Then copy it to a different machine and open the properties there. Terms that made the trip mean your tool is writing into the file. Anything that vanished means it is writing into its own database, which is a rather different thing.