I started developing MyKeyworder in 2010 in an attempt to combine my love of photography with my desire to learn to code with my interest in machine learning in a hope to make keywording less time-consuming. The project was originally called "ShutterChance" after a Japanese teenager who approached me to take her picture. At the time I was already thinking about making the web application but then it dawned on me that keywording must be even harder if English is the dominant language through which internet-based image searches are performed but the image creators didn't speak English well. In fact, even while creating this tool for photographers, I have had many people contact me saying that they find the tool useful as a means of acquiring knowledge of the English language. Over the years, as technology has improved, I have re-written the tool over and over. Those who have been using the tools since the beginning will have seen at least four major user interface changes based on their feedback as well as experimentation with lots of additional features like grammar highlighting, auto-suggest and others - many of which have to be either partially or fully re-written as software capabilities improve over time. I always welcome feedback, although I can't promise I can implement them all as this is just a side project for me - but still one I hope helps the creative community as a whole. If you like the tool and would like to support it, please consider donating. It helps pay for fees such as web hosting, domain registration and my donations to other services used behind the scenes.
14 Jun 2020: Today I published thre first version of a Wordpress plugin that enables Admin users to auto-tag batches of images with tags using the MyKeyworder image recogntion tool. The plugin is very simple - it makes a call to the MyKeyworder API, which can be accessed directly of course. However, for people who don't want to mess around with developing their own plugin, this simple tool extends the Bulk Actions capability of the List View in the Media Library to add tags to many images with keywords at once.
8 Apr 2020: I hope everyone is staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. What everyone is clearly doing while they are stuck indoors is keywording! MyKeyworder had its most visitors ever over the last 4 weeks. With that, came a lot of new requests: for help, for business opportunities, for magazine interviews and for enhancement requests. As the inbox has been coming under strain, I have created a support ticketing capability, which hopefully means that we can get back to you faster. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire The A-Team or just open a ticket under Support.
08 Feb 2020: The first steps towards keywording in languages other than English were completed today. The website tool now supports 21 different languages. Multi-language support is available for the website searches from the homepage, image recognition searches and also searches via the API. Multi-language is not yet available for the Lightroom Plug-in or Image Recognition. The language will default back to English unless you login, where you can change the default language.
15 Jan 2019: I finally got a chance to re-write part of the tool that needed some enhancing. The Shutterstock Optimizer enables you to analyze your Shutterstock portfolio - specifically how many keywords you added when you originally submitted the image. If you are like me, and have been submitting for years, then the earlier images tend not to have very good keywords. Now you can see quickly which images have less than an ideal number of keywords and then easily do something about it.
8 Jan 2017: The image recognition service moved into production today. This tool offers people the ability to generate keywords directly from images by using trained models to identify the contents of images. The service offers the ability to generate keywords from images stored on the web - either one-by-one or programmatically using an API - or by uploading images to MyKeyworder.
5 Nov 2016: After several years of crowdfunding from visitors to MyKeyworder, I finally found someone who shared by passion for photography and my desire to make keywording within Lightroom easier. Over the last few months Rasmus and I have been creating MyKeyworder for Lightroom to bring the power of MyKeyworder as a plugin for Lightroom users and today I can announce that the first version of the plugin is live for our visitors to download and use. Try it out. We hope you find it as useful as we do.
27 Sep 2016: It felt like time for an upgrade of the entire site to make use of new technologies that would enable both the lightroom plugin and the website itself to perform faster.
22 Feb 2014: How do you find a photographer/artist/designer who produces consistently good images in styles that you like? Until now, that was a time-consuming question to answer - it is often the case that although a photographer has created one image that fits your needs, that is the only one in that style. So what if you know you will need similar images in consistent styles? You can find the answer quickly and easily with "Find Creatives".
Created by Sam Chadwick. Find this site useful? Buy Sam a Coffee!
MyKeyworder references language content from Princeton's Wordnet and Moby Thesaurus. MyKeyworder also uses APIs from Google, Shutterstock, Flickr and several other third parties but is not affiliated with any of these services.