Both lists were perfect for my needs.  Other photographers in the group kept hearing me excitingly talking about all the different species of animals I was tagging in my images.  Quickly, the excitement spread within our group, including the African guides that kept their species identification books close at hand to answer my questions.  The guides seemed to get great joy in helping me find and shoot as many species as possible.

It was not only fun to tag my images, but also fun to see the others getting excited about trying to classify the birds and mammals from each day’s shoot.  Every night the subject of discussion seemed to always steer towards asking how many different species I found.  I would have never thought keeping track of the number of individual species of birds I saw before these lists, but now I know I shot over 30 species of mammals and 100 species of birds, not including different plumage or sex.

The new Mammals of the World keyword list fills a large gap for any nature photographer.  Tagging my images with these keyword lists made my trip to Africa even more enjoyable and an experience I will not soon forget.

The new list has replaced the old list on our servers, so if you purchase the list now you will get the new one. Those of you who want to upgrade can just import the new list over your old list. Note that this will result in duplicate keywords in cases where a typo was fixed. So if we had a keyword called “tpyo” and we changed it to “typo”, your list will contain both after the re-import. One way to remove the old keywords is to remove all keywords before importing the new keyword list, but this would also remove keywords attached to your images, so only do this if you know what you are doing.

• Birds of the World, which contains keywords for over 31,000 species of nearly every known bird around the world, including not only common names, but also genus / species names, full taxonomic structure, descriptive terms, colors, behaviors, and more. -Birds of North America, which contains keywords for birds of North America

If you currently spend any time keywording your bird images, we firmly believe that our product will save you an incredible amount of time. Learn more about our products at our product page.

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.

Terence writes, “The install into Lightroom went smoothly, and I am looking forward to using the keywords list to start cataloging my images.”

… my entire image database of 130,000 images is on Adobe Lightroom and all images are keyworded. In many subject areas, my keywords are exact and extensive. Almost anyone in the English-speaking world can find a needed image if it’s in my file. In other subject areas, marine life included, my keywords are very basic, or general, and need help. To help update my marine life keywords, I’ve done the Metadata Import of the nearly 13,000 keywords provided in your Master Marine Keywords List and I’m finding it extremely helpful and educational taking my marine files to the next level. I especially like the ability to start keywording and if I don’t have time to consult an ID book at that moment, keyword a common name > MORE KEYWORDS. This gets me back later to resolve the keywords to a more concise level. I appreciate the time and effort you and others put into making this product available.

MarineLife Keywords Trial Version Screenshot

The trial version can be imported into your keyword database without adversely affecting your current metadata, and can easily be upgraded to the full version.

To download the trial version, go to the MarineLife Keyword List product page.