Here's a note about a site feature that I know is affecting many photographers including myself, but one that I'm sure many people were not aware of.

The "description" in a deviation IS INCLUDED IN THE SITE SEARCH FEATURE. Not just the "keywords," which are supposed to be where you determine what search terms allow your deviation to be found in site searches. Every word you use in your artist description will cause your deviation to appear in a site search that includes that word.

This means that anyone who states, "This is not a stock image" automatically guarantees that the deviation will show up in every site search for "stock."

So by letting people know that our artworks are not available as a stock resource, we are actually telling people that our artworks are available as stock. Because I'm sure everyone knows as well as I do that not everyone is going to read the description and find the "NOT" before the word "stock" - just as the site search feature doesn't recognize the negative case either.

This was brought to my attention by a stock artist kind enough to let me know it was happening. I contacted the Help Desk, who told me that it had been "handed up the chain" to be taken care of. Weeks later, after a deluge of "Can I use your image in my photomanipulation?" notes, I wrote the Help Desk again. I'm now informed that deviation descriptions are meant to be searchable, so there is no intention of doing anything about this issue. The only solution offered is to alter the word "stock" in the description of EVERY deviation, so it has spaces (s t o c k) or some other such, and cannot be found by the site search. Despite the fact editing every deviation in one's gallery is a very time-consuming process, this is the only option given.

With all the issues of art theft around dA, it seems like a terrible idea to avoid addressing this problem. However if nothing else I hope to bring it to the attention of every artist on the site - BY TELLING PEOPLE THAT YOUR ART IS NOT STOCK, YOU ARE IN FACT PUTTING IT IN FRONT OF EVERY PERSON LOOKING FOR STOCK IMAGES TO USE.

Not to mention, this makes the site search feature much less effective all-around, again, because the site search does not recognize conditions or negatives. So if I were to say in my description, "Here is a departure from my usual subject matter of artistic nude images," THIS PHOTOGRAPH WOULD APPEAR IN A SEARCH FOR "NUDE" images. No wonder the site searches return so much material that is anything but what we were looking for.

So again - dA seems to have no interest in changing this functionality, but be aware - no matter what the context of any statement in your artist description, every word in it is searchable with the site search function.