MetaBrain Tools

AI keywording tools for stock photographers

Pick the agency or task you submit to. Each tool generates titles, descriptions and ranked keywords from your photos, video and vectors — free to start.

Why stock keywording is hard

Keywording is the part of stock photography nobody shoots for. A single image needs a title a buyer would recognise, a description that explains the situation, and forty to fifty keywords ranked so the important ones come first. Done by hand that is three to five minutes per file. Across a 200-shot take it is most of a working day — spent on data entry rather than on the next shoot.

The trap is that the obvious shortcut makes things worse. Generic auto-taggers list what is visible in the frame: woman, laptop, coffee, window. Those words are accurate and nearly worthless, because they are not what anybody types into a stock search. Buyers search for situations — "remote worker taking a video call from a home kitchen" — and agency algorithms rank on that match. Keyword count is not the metric; keyword intent is.

MetaBrain writes metadata the second way. Every title, description and keyword answers who is doing what, why, and where, and the keyword list is ordered by how closely each term matches a real buyer query rather than by how obvious the object is. Each keyword also carries a 0–100 relevance score, so the weak tail is visible and can be trimmed before submission instead of after a rejection.

Requirements then differ by agency, and that is where a single generic export falls apart. Shutterstock caps keywords at 50 and reads the title as its own field. Adobe Stock allows 49 and uses the title as the description. Getty Images and iStock do not accept free-text keywords at all — submissions are matched against a controlled vocabulary, so a term that is not in their list is silently dropped. 123RF stops at 40. Alamy separates "essential" keywords from the rest. Submitting one flat keyword blob everywhere means being truncated in some places and under-tagged in others.

The tools below are entry points into the same engine, each written around the agency or the job you actually have in front of you. Generate once, then export in the format the destination expects — CSV in seventeen agency profiles, XMP sidecar, JSON, or metadata written straight into the files. On the Hobby plan and above MetaBrain can deliver the finished files over FTP/SFTP as well, with the metadata already embedded.

Everything runs on the free tier first: 30 generations, no card, all four processing modes, photos, video and vector illustrations included. Use it on a batch you already submitted and compare the output against what you wrote by hand.

Keyword limits by agency