The tide is starting to turn from in-house to outsourced keywording if the recent CEPIC convention is anything to go by, says Keedup managing director Kevin Townsend.

"Between the PACA convention last October and CEPIC this month (June) there has been a noticeable change in the number of companies interested in the outsourcing message. That same pattern was repeated in talks with a series of British photo libraries after the convention."

Mr Townsend put the change down to two main factors – constantly changing keywording standards and the growth of digital imagery.

“Because companies such as Getty, Corbis and Jupiter are so influential in the market you have to stay up with the play as their standards change. Many photo libraries simply don’t generate enough images to warrant keeping up to speed with what is required. We heard from a number of companies at CEPIC who were complaining that they found the whole thing was too difficult to keep up with, and who can blame them.

“It’s not just a matter of paying attention to the changes, staff have to be trained and re-trained, software has to be altered. All of that adds greatly to the cost as well as the angst.”

As the number of images being produced in the digital age continued to grow, the problem of managing workload was getting much harder.

“You would think that more images would enable in-house teams to flourish. In some cases that’s true, but for many libraries the problem is dealing with production spikes.”

Bigger volumes of images made such spikes proportionally bigger and the feast and famine cycle added greater stress for photo library managers.

“The choice is to always get images out quickly, but suffer from overstaffing to achieve that, or to keep staffing at reasonable levels but be unable to cope when the pressure goes on.

“Often keywording is being done by people who would be better off spending their time selling images, recruiting photographers or editing production.”

Mr Townsend said the problems for editorial photo libraries were even worse, and some companies which had been adamant a year ago that their keywording would always be done in-house were now considering making the move.

The problems of production spikes were multiplied several times over because of the very high volumes amongst celebrity and news photo agencies, plus they had the problem that their images need to be out in the market place within hours.

“We know very well from our own experience that managing keywording operations around the clock isn’t easy or cheap. But if you are serving a global market your images need to be on that market keyworded and captioned and ready to go. Waiting around for the day staff to come in means you will be that much behind the competition.”