Despite the ease of consumer shopping these days, finding essential items is not always easy. Take the case of the lowly shoelace. You can’t do without them. And you need white ones for your sneakers, not black, not plaid, nor leather. You don’t feel like walking half a mile through a Wal-Mart. On-line shopping on the Internet would cost you three times the actual price when you add in the shipping. And gas prices make a special trip to the Dollar Store prohibitive.

I can’t suggest an easy way out of this dilemma. It’s interesting that the same parallel holds true for photo researchers looking for an essential picture for their publishing project.

But on this latter issue I can offer a solution.

Like on a shoe, any ol’ shoelace won’t do. For the researcher, that "just right" picture can turn a B-minus layout into an A-plus.

The savior in this case is the availability of search facilities on the Internet. Like the improvements in cell phones over the last two years, ‘search’ on the Internet has improved, also. Using a text search, rather than a picture search, is the simplest answer for the weary photo researcher.

"But are researchers really using text to find pictures?" you might ask.

Not all of them, because not all of them are aware of this fairly recent search method. But the successful researchers are finding out the benefits of this method, and growing numbers are climbing on board.

The top search engines these days seem to be Google, Yahoo and MSN. On your website, if you enter several words, even sentences or phrases, that these search engines can pick up in their frequent ‘web crawls’ of the Internet, your pictures and essential details will be indexed. In other words, you’ll be ‘cataloged’ like a reference book, just like in your local library. You and your picture descriptions will be identified. And you’ll be found.

Though each search engine will invite you to apply for a search (it’s free), you don’t have to. Like the census taker, they trace you down –in this case, about every three to six months, depending on their workload.

If you don’t have a website, for exposure and positioning your work to be accessible to photobuyers, place your photo descriptions (in text) on the PhotoSourceBANK at Photosource International. The web crawlers will index them and you, as on the PSI website. If you also have a personal website, the webcrawlers will index that, also, giving you double exposure.

Keep in mind that a site like the PhotoSourceBANK attracts a lot of traffic from photobuyers. Photobuyers, tend to opt for easy shopping by adding the word –‘photosource’ to their search descriptions, which directs their search to the major image database of the PhotoSourceBANK.

As for shoelaces, however, I don’t have an easy answer for you. –RE

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