Lowercased
Each term is folded to lower case, so "Golden Retriever" and "golden retriever" cannot both appear as separate entries.
Stock Keyword Generator
Keywords are how buyers find an image. Metadata Studio reads each picture and returns a list already sorted by relevance, cleaned of noise and ready to drop into an Adobe or Shutterstock export.
A ranked list, not an alphabetical dump
Most keyword tools hand you a bag of words. Metadata Studio returns an ordered list, and the order is the point. The vision model looks at the image and starts with the terms that most precisely describe it — the subject, the action, the setting and the mood. From there it widens out to the broader concepts a buyer might search, ending with the loosest terms at the bottom.
That ranking matters because both Adobe Stock and Shutterstock treat keyword order as a signal. Put the specific, accurate terms first and the generic ones last, and the list reads like a human wrote it for the picture rather than a thesaurus emptied onto the page. A list that opens with the exact subject and closes with general themes gives both the search index and a human reviewer the right first impression.
How many keywords to ask for
The generator accepts a target between 20 and 49 keywords per image. In practice, 20 to 40 is the range that works best: enough coverage to catch the searches that suit the image, without padding the list with near-duplicates that dilute the terms that actually matter. Below 20 and you are leaving obvious queries uncovered; at the very top of the range you are usually adding slack.
Set the count once in the sidebar and it applies to the batch. Every row still reports its own keyword total, so you can scan the table and see which images came back thin.
What happens to each keyword
Raw model output needs a pass before it is usable, so every list is normalised on the way back:
Punctuation stripped
Stray commas, trailing periods and smart quotes are removed so the term is clean and the CSV does not need escaping for it.
Hype removed
Banned and promotional words are dropped, keeping the list descriptive rather than salesy.
Singular and plural merged
If both forms of a word come back, they are collapsed into one entry instead of competing for the same search.
The result is a tighter list you can trust to import without duplicate or malformed terms. If you want background on why those rules exist, the resources and keyword pruning guide walks through them.
Pruning and editing the list
A generated list is a strong first draft, but the last ten percent is editorial. Read from the top down and ask two questions of each term: would a buyer type this, and does the image really show it? Drop anything vague, anything that describes a nearby idea rather than this picture, and any word you already have in another form.
Every keyword is editable inline, and you can regenerate a single image without touching the rest of the batch. If a subject is recurring across a shoot, fixing the list on the first frame gives you a pattern you can copy to the others by hand.
One list, both marketplaces
The same generated list feeds the Keywords column in both exports. Use the
Adobe Stock metadata generator when you are preparing
an Adobe_Stock_CSV with its Title, Category and Releases fields, or the
Shutterstock metadata generator when you need a
Description, Categories and the Editorial, Mature Content and Illustration flags.
Start from one clean list and adjust it per marketplace only where their guidance differs. To see how the model produces the words in the first place, read the AI generator overview.
Stock keyword questions
How does the generator rank stock keywords?
The model returns keywords in relevance order, starting with the terms that most precisely describe the image and ending with looser, broader concepts, so the strongest terms sit at the front of the list.
How many keywords can I generate?
You can generate between 20 and 49 keywords per image, and 20 to 40 is the recommended range. The keyword count is reported for every row.
Does the generator clean up the keywords?
Yes. Keywords are lowercased, punctuation is stripped, banned and hype words are removed, and singular and plural duplicates are merged so one term is not listed twice.
Do I use the same keywords for Adobe and Shutterstock?
The generated list feeds the Keywords column in both the Adobe and Shutterstock exports, so you can start from one list and adjust it per marketplace if their guidance differs.
Generate a ranked keyword list in seconds
Add your own provider key, upload an image and edit the ordered list before you export either CSV.