There are thousands of hours of footage out there. How to avoid spending thousands of hours finding it?

Seek and ye shall find. Well, almost, but not quite.

All the major stock image libraries have spend serious money tagging their wonderful images so you can get what you want more easily.

But here’s the problem. Computers aren’t as smart as you. They’re fast, yes, but they can’t interpret your thoughts.

So here’s a simple tip. Be very, very literal and as descriptive as possible.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you type ‘fish’ in the search box.

Bad idea.

Because you will get images of river fish, or people going fishing, or fried fish, or fish in a bowl or sushi. Now unless you’re looking for all of these, which is doubtful, you have to be more specific.

Instead, type in men on fishing trip. Or salmon swimming upstream.

That way you can access thousands of hours of great moving images without wasting thousands of hours.

It takes a bit of practice. But we all know what practice makes.