Location Keywords for Stock Photos: City, Country, GPS

Buyers search by place all the time: a hotel needs its own city, a travel magazine needs a region, an agency needs a country for a campaign. A file with the right location keywords turns up in those searches; a file with the wrong one turns up in front of the wrong buyer, or gets questioned by an inspector. This guide covers which location keywords to add, in what form for Getty Images and Adobe Stock, and the mistakes we see most often when we review tagged batches.

The one rule: name only the places you know

Every other point in this guide follows from one rule. A location keyword is a statement of fact, so add it only when you know it is true: either the place is clearly visible in the frame, or you know it because you were there.

Guessing is where location keywords go wrong, and AI tagging tools guess more readily than people do. In one batch we reviewed, seven photos of the same hillside had picked up six different named mountain areas on three continents. Each name was a plausible fit for a green slope; none was where the photos were taken. A buyer looking for that national park who finds a different one stops trusting the rest of your keywords too.

Adobe says the same thing from the other direction: its keyword tutorial advises leaving out the name of a location when it is not relevant to what the image shows.

Add every level, from specific to general

A buyer may search for the landmark, the city or only the country. Cover each level as its own keyword, as far down as you can verify:

The country matters most. Adobe's keyword help pages tell contributors to add the country alongside the city, and Adobe's guide to metadata uses "Eiffel Tower, Paris, France" as its example for a place photo. A buyer filtering for a country should not miss your file because you named only the town.

Stop at the level you can verify. If you know the country but not the town, the country alone is correct; a guessed town is not.

Getty Images and iStock: use the qualified form

Getty keywords come from its controlled vocabulary, and place names are where that vocabulary helps you most, because so many place names are shared. The vocabulary separates them with a Name - Qualifier form. A few real entries:

Pick the qualified entry that matches your place. A bare "Portland" leaves the choice to the system; the qualified form costs the same keyword slot and removes the guess. Our guide to why Getty rejects keywords covers the same problem for other ambiguous words.

Getty's upload CSV also has its own country column, separate from the keywords. Fill it with the country of the shoot; our Getty ESP CSV guide shows the full column layout.

Adobe Stock: plain words, placed by importance

Adobe has no controlled vocabulary, so write place names as ordinary words: "Portland", "Oregon", "USA" as separate keywords, not "Portland - Oregon". The Getty form reads as an odd phrase on Adobe, which is one reason a list written for Getty should not be pasted into an Adobe upload unchanged.

Order matters on Adobe, because it gives the first ten keywords the most weight. Where the location goes depends on what the picture is about:

• The place is the subject(a skyline, a landmark, a landscape): the location leads. Adobe's metadata guide starts its keyword order for places with the geographic location.
• People or an activity are the subject and the place is the background: put the subject and the action first and the location after them. A buyer looking for a couple cooking will not search for the city first.

Our Adobe Stock contributor guide walks through the full keyword order.

GPS: where you stood is not always what you show

Most cameras and phones record GPS coordinates in the file. They are useful, but they record where the camera was, not what is in the picture. Shoot a mountain with a long lens from a valley 20 km away and the coordinates point to the valley.

The photo metadata standard used across the industry (IPTC) makes the same distinction. It has one field for the Location Created ("the location the photo was taken") and another for the Location Shown in the Image, and says to fill in both when they differ. For keywords, the location shown is the one that matters: that is what a buyer is looking for.

Three practical points:

• Turn coordinates into words.Buyers search for "Lisbon", not numbers. Whatever the agency does with the GPS data in your file, the place names need to be in the keywords.
• Stay at the level of the place, not the address. City, region and country are what buyers search. A street address is rarely useful in keywords.
• Think about privacy.Coordinates can point to an exact house. For shoots in someone's home, consider removing the GPS data before upload.

When the frame cannot show the place

Plenty of good stock photos do not show where they were taken: a close portrait, a market stall, a forest path. If the place matters, it has to come from you. Three habits prevent most mistakes:

1. Write the place into your notes or metadata, not only into the file name.A folder called "Lisbon trip" or a file name with the town in it does not reach the agency. In the batches we review, a place that appears only in file names is usually missing from every keyword list.
2. Keep a note for one file on that file. If one photo in a city batch was taken at a specific market, that market belongs on that photo only, not on the whole batch.
3. Leave the city off generic scenes. A studio portrait or a plain office shot in Berlin is not a picture of Berlin. Adding the city sends the file to buyers looking for Berlin, who will not find it there. Adobe advises against location names that are not relevant to what is shown.

Landmarks: keyword them, but check the release rules

A recognisable landmark is a strong keyword, and it can also bring legal requirements. Some buildings and sites need a property release for commercial use, and some cannot be licensed commercially at all: Adobe's list of known image restrictions includes the Sydney Opera House, for example. Check the rules before you upload, not after. Our guide to model and property releases covers this in detail.

Name a landmark only when it is clearly in the frame. A skyline photo gets the landmarks you can actually see, not every famous building in that city.

The same rules apply to video

Video clips follow the same rules. Drone footage is the exception that needs most care: an aerial clip of a coast often shows no landmark at all, so the location keywords depend entirely on what you know about where you flew. See how to keyword stock video for the rest of a video list.

Checklist before you upload

1. Every place keyword is visible in the frame or known from the shoot.
2. The country is there whenever a city or region is.
3. On Getty, each place uses the qualified form that matches it, and the country column is filled.
4. On Adobe, place names are plain words, high in the list only when the place is the subject.
5. The keywords name the place shown, not just the GPS position.
6. Places known only from file names are written into the metadata.
7. Generic studio and interior shots carry no city.
8. Every landmark keyword is checked against the release rules.

Sources & further reading

• Adobe Stock: keyword tutorial
• Adobe Stock: tips for effective titles and keywords
• Adobe Stock: known image restrictions
• IPTC Photo Metadata Standard: Location Created and Location Shown in the Image
• The Getty Images controlled vocabulary guide
• Why Getty rejects keywords