Free fixer
Stock Video Keyword Cleaner
Paste the keywords you have written for a clip, one per line or comma-separated, and get back a clean, ordered list: duplicates gone, repeated stems merged, capped at 49, with the ten that carry the most weight in search shown first.
A line break anywhere in the box means one keyword per line; with no line breaks, commas split the list instead.
Paste a keyword list to clean it.
Why order and repeats both cost you
Adobe caps a clip at 49 keywords and treats the first ten as the ones that carry the most weight in search. A list padded with near-duplicates, "lake" next to "lakes", "swim" next to "swimming", wastes some of that early weight on words that mean the same thing rather than adding a new one. This tool keeps the first form it sees of each word and drops the repeats, so the ten that survive at the top are ten different ideas, not five said twice.
The cleaning is deliberately conservative. Two words are only merged when stripping a plain plural, "-ing" or "-ed" leaves them identical, never when it would require guessing at a silent letter or a doubled consonant. Two genuinely different keywords are never merged into one just because they share a few letters.
One line, one keyword, unless a comma sneaks in
Paste keywords one per line and this tool treats each line as one keyword, exactly as the marketplace would if it were fed the same list without commas joining them. If a single line still has a comma in it, that whole line becomes one keyword literally containing a comma rather than two keywords, the same mistake that happens when metadata is written with keywords joined by commas instead of kept as a proper list. This tool flags that line rather than silently splitting it, since splitting on a guess could just as easily break a keyword that is meant to read as one phrase.
The marketplaces do not all want the same count. Pond5 wants 5 to 50 keywords, Shutterstock wants 7 to 50 unique ones (it does not keep your order, only the set), and Getty wants 5 to 50 as well, fewer than five being as invalid there as more than fifty. This tool checks the cleaned count against all three and says which one your list would fail.
Quick tips
- Around 25 to 40 well-chosen keywords beats padding a list to 49: guesses added just to fill space are what gets a submission rejected, not a shorter honest list.
- Put the words that matter most first: subject, then any validated scientific name, then habitat and behaviour. The first ten are the ones search weighs most.
- If you paste one keyword per line, keep each line to one idea. A comma inside a line will not be split for you.
- Never repeat a stem on purpose to "cover more searches": Adobe and Shutterstock both read it as the same keyword said twice, not two.
Limits
What this tool cannot check
- This only cleans the words you paste. It cannot tell you whether a scientific name is real: that needs checking against a species registry, not a stemmer.
- It cannot tell you whether a keyword is in Getty’s controlled vocabulary. Getty does not publish that list, rewrites accepted keywords into its own wording ("calm water" becomes "Calm Water"), and a keyword can be accepted on one clip and refused on another.
- On Shutterstock, applying a new keyword list to a clip a second time replaces the old one wholesale rather than merging. This tool has no way to know what is already on an account.
Want the full picture? Read why an unvalidated scientific name is worth more risk than it looks.