How many keywords should you use on stock photos?

It's one of the most common questions new contributors ask: how many keywords should I add? The honest answer is that the right number is the number of genuinely relevant terms — but there are clear practical bounds worth knowing.

The practical sweet spot

For most images, 25 to 45 relevant keywords is the sweet spot. Below about 15, you're leaving discoverability on the table. Above about 50, you're almost certainly padding with weak or repetitive terms that dilute your relevance score.

Why relevance beats volume

Marketplaces increasingly reward relevance. If half your keywords don't match the image, every search you appear in becomes a poorer match, and buyers who click and bounce send a negative signal. A tight set of 30 accurate keywords outperforms a bloated set of 50 padded ones.

Spend your keyword budget wisely

• First 10: your strongest, most literal subject and action terms.
• Next 15: setting, attributes, colours, and number of people.
• Final 10–20: concepts, moods, and related synonyms buyers might use.
• Cut anything you couldn't honestly point to in the image.

Don't forget singular and plural

Buyers search both 'child' and 'children', 'flower' and 'flowers'. Including natural variations is fair game and broadens your reach — but only where it genuinely applies.

ImageToStock caps each image at a clean, de-duplicated, relevance-ordered set so you hit the sweet spot automatically — no manual counting, no padding.