How Melody Revnak Photography added metal and canvas to its titles

Melody has been behind the camera for more than 30 years. She lives in Redding, California, and her work is inspired by the beauty of God's creation. The shop starts close to home, with Mount Shasta mirrored in a still lake, Burney Falls and the redwoods, then travels: Lanikai Beach at sunrise, Mesa Arch in Utah, Yellowstone elk in winter, a humpback whale breaching off O'ahu, the beaches of Thailand.

Every piece is printed in the USA by her professional photo lab and checked before it ships. Buyers choose ready-to-hang metal, canvas gallery wraps, framed prints or fine art photo paper, and she's happy to make custom sizes or a room mockup on request. US shipping is free. Since 2020 the shop has made 696 sales.

Someone shopping for wall art usually starts with a place or a feeling. Hawaii. A mountain lake. Something calm for the bedroom. Once they've found the view, the next question is practical: what arrives at the door? A metal panel, a stretched canvas, a print to frame?

Melody's earlier titles were written around the scene. They named the beach, the island and the style of photo, which matters to anyone who has stood in that spot. The format lived further down the page. With close to 200 active listings, adding it to every title meant a lot of rewriting. Each listing also takes 13 tags and has several photos that need a short description, and that work adds up fast.

Melody does this in Alura's listing editor. She opens a listing, ticks title, tags and alt text in the optimization settings, and clicks Start optimization. The AI reads the listing and comes back with a draft. Nothing changes on Etsy until she clicks Publish changes, so every suggestion can be read and edited first, and the listing history keeps the old version if she wants it back.

Most of her new titles started as AI drafts. The ones that stayed keep the place up front and add the formats at the end: "in Metal, Canvas, or Paper" or "on Metal or Canvas". Some titles she still writes herself in the same editor. The rainbow eucalyptus print from Maui is one of hers.

Alt text gets the same pass. It's the short description of each photo that screen readers and search engines use, and with several photos per listing, it's the part of a listing that's easiest to leave blank.

Melody also runs Alura's Pinterest automations. Smart Pins fills a queue with pins made from her active listings, picked mostly by Etsy listing views, and Pin New Listings picks up new prints within a day of them going live. The pin text is written by AI for Pinterest, so it carries the same practical detail as her titles. One pin reads "Mount Shasta Lake Reflection Metal Wall Art, 3-Panel Decor", and the description says it's ready to hang. She can still open the queue to reorder pins, edit the text or publish one straight away.

Her boards follow her subjects: Hawaii Photography Wall Art, Southwest Wall Art, National & State Parks and Coastal Wall Art.

The titles below are live on Etsy now. Each one keeps the place and adds the format. The Maui sunset tells a shopper up front that it comes in metal, canvas or paper. The Mount Shasta print now says Northern California and names metal and canvas. The red rose traded its Valentine gift phrase for the two formats a buyer is choosing between.

The tags moved the same way. On her Belize palm tree print, tags like "metal print art", "palm tree canvas" and "ready to hang art" now sit beside "Caribbean Wall Art", so the listing describes both the view and the object.

Read side by side, the earlier titles describe the photograph, and the new ones also describe the piece that goes on the wall.

Melody's advice for other photographers selling prints is to answer the buyer's practical questions before they have to ask. Say what the print is made of. Show it on a wall, in a real room, at a real size. And make it easy to ask for something custom. Many buyers have one particular wall in mind, and a quick message about size can turn into the exact print they wanted.