Visual Search: Will It Solve The Problems Stock Photo Customers Face?

Posted on 3/22/2016 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (1)

There is a huge amount of focus on Visual Search and its potential for the stock photo industry. In my opinion Visual Search Will Not Solve The Problems Stock Photo Customers Face. Visual search can be very useful in finding an image that the customer has a copy of in hand. It can find all the uses on the Internet of a particular image, but that’s not what most customers want.

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Comments

Sheron Resnick Posted Mar 23, 2016
Dear Jim:

I concur with your analysis. 20/20 Software has had quite a bit of experience with visual search. Over the years we have implemented it on four different websites, with three different technologies, and multiple strategies. We have used the "more like this" strategy and the "upload a sample" strategy.

What we found was that, by and large, visual search was not that helpful to users. We tracked the amount of visual searches that users did, and it was never more than 10% of all searches, averaging about 5%. We did focus groups to see if buyers found it to be helpful, and by and large they did not.

The strategy that worked the best was to combine keywords with visual search, so that, if searching for dogs, the resulting visual-search images were all of dogs, not cats, lions, tigers, and hyenas. A small percentage, people liked that the visual search gave them options other than "dog", but usually they were looking for a dog and were annoyed to get other animals. By and large, in our focus groups, people were more satisfied with narrowing by keyword than expanding using "more like this".

Shutterstock is currently using the "upload a sample" strategy. This works best when you find an image on one site and want to see if it's cheaper on Shutterstock. It definitely works for that purpose. It will be interesting to see how this works for them.

Best,

Don Resnick

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