Getty keywords that pass controlled-vocabulary validation

It's Getty and iStock's official list of approved keywords. Only terms on the list are accepted, which is why free-text keywording so often gets rejected. Our deep-dive guide explains it in full.

Yes. Every keyword in the Getty export comes from Getty's official controlled vocabulary, so your submission isn't rejected for invalid terms.

Yes. iStock uses the same controlled vocabulary as Getty, so the same export works for both.

A Getty ESP CSV with the columns Getty expects: file name, created date, title, description, country, brief code, and up to 50 controlled-vocabulary keywords.

Getty and iStock allow up to 50 keywords per file, but more isn't better — only relevant, controlled-vocabulary terms help, and irrelevant ones can hurt your ranking. The tool fills the slots that genuinely apply rather than padding to 50.

Because Getty only accepts keywords from its controlled vocabulary. Any free-text keyword that doesn't map to an official term is dropped on submission, so a file keyworded for Adobe Stock often loses half its tags on Getty. This tool maps every keyword to the vocabulary first, so nothing is rejected.

Yes, that is what the Refine tool does. Paste your existing keywords, or upload a bulk CSV, and we map every term onto Getty's controlled vocabulary and top the list up with in-vocabulary terms the asset supports — so more of them survive qHero refinement instead of being dropped. No image is uploaded and none is needed; it works on the words alone. 1 credit per asset, which makes it the cheap way to bring an old back catalogue up to standard.

Yes, and they need different treatment. Getty's controlled vocabulary was built from photography, so the words the illustration trade actually uses — flat, isolated, pictogram, outline, stroke, icon set — were never in it. Tick "Illustrations / vector art" and a separate vector vocabulary switches on, drawn from published, accepted illustration portfolios; measured against 7,577 live Getty illustrations it recognises about 21 more keywords on a typical file. Vector batches also export with .eps file names so they import into qHero without errors.

From the photo's EXIF capture time — the moment the shutter fired — read in your browser before upload. We deliberately do not fall back to the file's own timestamp: that is when the file was last written, so any image you have edited or re-exported would carry a date months after the shoot, and Getty checks the created date against the date on your model release. If a photo carries no EXIF date we leave the column blank rather than write a wrong one.