Underwater Photography Magazine (UwP), a free PDF magazine, has published a review of MarineLife Keywords written by marine biologist and award-winning photographer Alexander Mustard. The review can be found in their 50th issue, which is available as a free download from their website. Alex says:

The list includes the genus and species of 12,000 species, including over 4,000 fish, 4,000 invertebrates, and all known marine turtles, rays, skates, marine reptiles, and marine mammals… The first thing I did was to try to find any absentees. It is not easy. The coverage is fantastic…

… keywording is an essential part of workflow for anyone who supplies their images to photo stock libraries. MLKL was built for these tasks and having tasted it I could never give it up.

It is often said that time is money. I can’t think of many other products, designed for underwater photographers, which will save you as much time for so little money. A highly recommended purchase.

Alex likes it! :)

Finally, I had my first real-life chance to make use of the MarineLife Keywords List I wrote about a while ago.

All I had to do to label my squid shots was look-up “bigfin reef squid” in the MarineLife Keywords index that I had already imported into Aperture, and, like magic, I had everything I needed in order to tag the squid images:

bigfin reef squid: Sepioteuthis lessoniana; bigfin squid: Sepioteuthis lessoniana; Cephalopods: Cephalopoda; Invertebrates; Loliginidae; Mollusks: Mollusca; Squid: Teuthida; Teuthoidea

…in practical terms, meaning I didn’t have to (mis)type all those long multi-syllabic tongue-twisters into each photo’s metadata. All I had to do was drag-and-drop the list onto all my squid files and I was done!

Read the whole journal entry to learn more about Tony’s digital workflow.

I have been trying it and there is no doubt that it is awesome. Anyone who has to keyword marine life should get it – whether it is for library submissions or for your own indexing. For me its a no-brainer because it works and saves masses of time. Its that simple…

So far I have not found any marine species that are not there (and I have tried some tricky ones) – well apart from Sus scrofa – which I think should be added as a tribute to Wetpixel Expeditions!

Now you might think that I am only writing positive words because a friend of mine helped develop it. Far from it. I have tried to look as critically as I can, but it is hard to find criticism. It installs non-destructively to all you previous work in seconds, just works and saves masses of time.

You can read Alex’s full post at the Wetpixel forums.

There’s help available now, at least for marine photographers, in the form of a pre-packaged list of key words for marine life that covers the genus and species of over 4,000 fish, 4,000 invertebrates, and all known marine turtles, rays, skates, sharks, marine reptiles and marine mammals…basically, just about everything you’re likely to encounter.

What this means is that once you’ve identified your subject (No…unfortunately the keyword list cannot ID marine life for you!), you can literally drag-and-drop all the relevant keywords onto your file(s), saving you the time and hassle of typing, and also ensuring consistency.

Tony Wu keywords in Aperture

So to wrap up, if you take a lot of photos and need a good filing system…use Aperture or Lightroom, and get the MarineLife Keywords list to make keywording quicker and easier.

Tony is one of the most prolific underwater photographers around. At his blog, tonywublog.com, Tony posts regular updates from his regular trips to incredible dive destinations. Not only does Tony post examples of his incredible work, he also writes about the techniques he uses to capture them.

Read the full review for Tony’s insights about keywording.