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Can a week be reduced to a day?


Keith Douglas

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I recently submitted two batches of photos to Alamy. One batch passed QC within a couple of days. The second batch is now at the dreaded "Processing - average wait time 24 hours" status, which last time meant that it took 7 days for the batch to get into QC and then pass with a partial failure on one image. Apparently a partial failure means that something went wrong in the upload or processing, even though everything was reported as OK. It is not an indication of any fault in the image itself. It will be interesting to see whether a third batch, which I have just submitted, overtakes batch 2!

 

Would it not be simpler, and fairer to contributors, for any 'partial failure' photos to be removed from the batch and QC to proceed as normal on the remainder? It's easy enough then for the contributor to resubmit any photos that have been removed, and we don't have to endure extra unnecessary delay in getting images on sale.

 

Has anybody else encountered this issue?

 

Keith

 

 

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I have to say, Keith, that I have not (as yet!) encountered this issue.  I have had the odd 'partial failure' due to upload issues, yet the processing time and QC turnaround seemed to be no different than it otherwise would have been.

 

I think that you may possibly have experienced one of the many glitches that seem to pop up every now and again?  One or two batches that I have uploaded in the past couple of months have bounced back and forth between 23 and 24 hours, yet all have gone to awaiting, and ultimately passed, QC.

 

Generally, I have found the process to work very well, and - once the images get out of the automated system - I have found the QC folk to do their job remarkedly rapidly and efficiently considering the huge number of images they have to process!

 

Fingers x'd that this is just one more little glitch for you and nothing more.

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I have to say, Keith, that I have not (as yet!) encountered this issue.  I have had the odd 'partial failure' due to upload issues, yet the processing time and QC turnaround seemed to be no different than it otherwise would have been.

 

I think that you may possibly have experienced one of the many glitches that seem to pop up every now and again?  One or two batches that I have uploaded in the past couple of months have bounced back and forth between 23 and 24 hours, yet all have gone to awaiting, and ultimately passed, QC.

 

Generally, I have found the process to work very well, and - once the images get out of the automated system - I have found the QC folk to do their job remarkedly rapidly and efficiently considering the huge number of images they have to process!

 

Fingers x'd that this is just one more little glitch for you and nothing more.

 

Thanks Danny

 

I agree, I've found the QC process works very well too once the photos get to that stage, which has been 99% of the time for me. I will see what happens this time, but it's just a bit frustrating because i) There seems to be nothing that can be done to move things on ii) There's nothing that I can do to prevent it happening and iii) The feedback to contributors from the upload process is not very informative.

 

Actually, there are a couple of things I could do. I could submit much smaller batches (<10) so that I 'lose' less photos in the process if it happens. Or, I could resubmit the batch of 23 as soon as it goes to "average wait time 24 hours". But I'm reluctant to do either.

 

Hopefully Alamy will take a look at this and make some changes to reduce this annoyance.

 

 

Keith

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I've had this happen and I remember in the old forum Alamy explained the issue and it depends on which one of their servers on their end ends up processing the image.  If there's an error in receiving the image, the servers attempt to recover the image automatically.  If memory serves me correctly, the server attempts recovery 7 or 8 times before either the image is recovered or the image is deemed not recoverable and then subsequently moved to the review queue.

 

Images are not moved from the upload queue to the review queue until the batch of images are received correctly (and have gone through the processing attempt mentioned above).

 

At least that's what I remember from the explanation.

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  • 2 months later...

I've had this happen and I remember in the old forum Alamy explained the issue and it depends on which one of their servers on their end ends up processing the image.  If there's an error in receiving the image, the servers attempt to recover the image automatically.  If memory serves me correctly, the server attempts recovery 7 or 8 times before either the image is recovered or the image is deemed not recoverable and then subsequently moved to the review queue.

 

Images are not moved from the upload queue to the review queue until the batch of images are received correctly (and have gone through the processing attempt mentioned above).

 

At least that's what I remember from the explanation.

 

That's right Ed. Often, during this procedure, an image that has failed initial processing is successfully processed during one of the re-attempts. In the long run this saves contributors having to upload again - however if the glitch remains (and this can be down to a whole number of reasons, file name, corrupt jpeg etc) than it can take a week to go through.

 

Cheers

 

Alamy

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