DDoug Posted February 2, 2015 Share Posted February 2, 2015 I have yet another keyword question which is actually a discretion question. It may come across sour grapes, probably because that’s what it is, but I’ve been wracking my brain to come up with phrasing that would hide that fact. No luck, so here goes: Some images I was planning to upload are of an outdoor market in Germany. So a first step was to see what Alamy already has on that subject. There are going on 9K and some of them are really excellent. Hat off to the shooters. Then I look at what Alamy has in the “creative” section. They include a few bland exteriors of a Dresden apartment building and a panorama of Frankfurt-am-Main which have nothing whatsoever to do with markets, outdoor or otherwise. What is the message Alamy is sending to buy ers? Is it, “We don’t know what we’re looking at, aside from technical aspects, and moreover we don’t care?” That’s the message I get. Where’s the outdoor market? Who designated shots of an apartment building — apparently constructed during that period of architectural vacuity that accompanied a rush to rebuild after WWII devastation — as “creative”? If the creative section is to be so divorced from keyword content, let alone photographic creativity, how about dispensing with it altogether? Either that or, in the interest of increased sales, how about selecting actually creative images that do in fact represent the keywords in question? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 2, 2015 Share Posted February 2, 2015 ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted February 2, 2015 Share Posted February 2, 2015 Interestingly my search returns 11299 images, 35 in creative but no apartments, otherwise quite similar. The apartments are surely a return on 'outdoor germany' but I agree, don't really belong there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DDoug Posted February 2, 2015 Author Share Posted February 2, 2015 The 8,573 results I get are for "outdoor market germany". Searching "outdoor germany" yields almost a quarter million results: elephants, seals, sheep... Who decides what is creative, and on what basis? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 2, 2015 Share Posted February 2, 2015 ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted February 2, 2015 Share Posted February 2, 2015 The creative section needs a complete rethink and subsequent revamp but I don't think it is a priority for Alamy. Judging from a few searches on my Irish images, certain agency images appear to qualify as creative simply because they are submitted by a particular agency and are presumably royalty free (so can be used by creative professionals for advertising). Many of these images are obviously old scans from slides with poor image quality and would be very unlikely to even make it through QC if they had to take that route. And there are some weird ones. A search for Dublin Bay yields over 150 images in the creative section, most of which are good quality studio shots of dublin bay prawns, with a selection of shots of varying quality of Dublin Bay itself. I doubt this was what Alamy had in mind when they introduced the creative section and I am sure there are countless other examples of stuff like this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Brooks Posted February 2, 2015 Share Posted February 2, 2015 I am well represented in the "Creative" section, but I think it works against me. I think some of my better work is relegated to the "relevant" section. Death to the "Creative" section!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Brook Posted February 3, 2015 Share Posted February 3, 2015 * Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Brooks Posted February 3, 2015 Share Posted February 3, 2015 It is called Artificial Stupidity and there is an image for that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Travelshots Posted February 3, 2015 Share Posted February 3, 2015 Photographers with a large sales to images ratio could automatically be included in the Creative section... as clients have already selected their images as superior. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Brook Posted February 3, 2015 Share Posted February 3, 2015 ,, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KWheal Posted February 3, 2015 Share Posted February 3, 2015 The shame is that the decent money is in commercial sales . I only have 2 out of 10,000+ images in creative in their own right and a few more in creative from specific search terms so if the searcher just uses creative for searches I have no chance even though some of my "similar" photos to those in creative are, in my opinion, no worse , if not better, than a lot of those already there. It seems that certain large collections were given creative status in bulk, no matter what their content. Alamy did say they would be working through the collection hand picking photos to go in the creative section but I for 1 do not see that happening. I believe this was stated by alamy to pacify contributors but I stand to be corrected. For those who are calling for a change in the creative section I am afraid it will not happen as alamy stated in the past that their "creative" purchasers were more than happy with this new system when it was introduced. What this suggests is that those purchasers are using the creative tag leaving a lot of contributors out in the cold who have comparable photographs Just my thoughts Kevin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pearl Posted February 3, 2015 Share Posted February 3, 2015 The shame is that the decent money is in commercial sales . I only have 2 out of 10,000+ images in creative in their own right and a few more in creative from specific search terms so if the searcher just uses creative for searches I have no chance even though some of my "similar" photos to those in creative are, in my opinion, no worse , if not better, than a lot of those already there. It seems that certain large collections were given creative status in bulk, no matter what their content. Alamy did say they would be working through the collection hand picking photos to go in the creative section but I for 1 do not see that happening. I believe this was stated by alamy to pacify contributors but I stand to be corrected. For those who are calling for a change in the creative section I am afraid it will not happen as alamy stated in the past that their "creative" purchasers were more than happy with this new system when it was introduced. What this suggests is that those purchasers are using the creative tag leaving a lot of contributors out in the cold who have comparable photographs Just my thoughts Kevin I couldn't agree more Kevin. As for "Alamy working through the collection" well it isn't going to happen for many of us. I was told quite bluntly by Alamy that they wouldn't be looking at my collection anytime soon as I am primarily an editorial photographer. That was pretty demotivating. Pearl Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dov makabaw Posted February 7, 2015 Share Posted February 7, 2015 The scattergun approach to keywording may save time but results in a lot of extra irrelevant hits which inevitable lower the ranking as well as irritate would be buyers. I have yet to get my head round the creative status category - guess I am not in that game. Be interested to hear if the buyers find it useful. dov Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IanGibson Posted October 4, 2015 Share Posted October 4, 2015 I know that this a pretty old thread to be resurrecting, but I now have a pennyworth of information. I performed a search on one of my zoomed images recently using the search term which produced the zoom. I couldn't find my zoomed image in the first few pages (there were about 250 returned images), but I did note that two other images of mine turned up in the first page of the Creative section. I hadn't considered them to be particularly creative - they were basically photos of a building taken through a barred window, one with building in focus, and one with the bars in focus. Other photographers had stood in the same place and taken the same image, so mine weren't original, either. So it's definitely possible to get photos in the Creative section, but I'm at a loss to work out how. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IanGibson Posted October 5, 2015 Share Posted October 5, 2015 I know that this a pretty old thread to be resurrecting, but I now have a pennyworth of information. I performed a search on one of my zoomed images recently using the search term which produced the zoom. I couldn't find my zoomed image in the first few pages (there were about 250 returned images), but I did note that two other images of mine turned up in the first page of the Creative section. I hadn't considered them to be particularly creative - they were basically photos of a building taken through a barred window, one with building in focus, and one with the bars in focus. Other photographers had stood in the same place and taken the same image, so mine weren't original, either. So it's definitely possible to get photos in the Creative section, but I'm at a loss to work out how. Could it have been that although you selected the "creative" option, that there were none, which means the search results will automatically show "relevant" images? You don't usually see any (many) in the creative section with only 250 results. Possibly. I'm used to seeing 'Creative' followed by 'End of creative' but that doesn't seem to happen in this case. The Creative section and Relevant section seem to show the same photos in the same order. So they all look like they are 'Creative' Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted October 5, 2015 Share Posted October 5, 2015 "End of creative" has definitely ended. I've looked at a subject where I know which of my images have shown up in that section and now those images do show up first with the rest coming along later. There is also a lot of clumping --- with seven of mine showing up in a row. Not unhappy when they are mine but, of course, it also happens when it is someone else's images. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johnnie5 Posted October 5, 2015 Share Posted October 5, 2015 When I do a search using the keywords "California north coast" and click on creative I get results that look like they were chosen by a hormone frenzied teenage boy. Its rather embarrassing. Maybe they should rename creative to irrelevant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Brook Posted October 5, 2015 Share Posted October 5, 2015 When I do a search using the keywords "California north coast" and click on creative I get results that look like they were chosen by a hormone frenzied teenage boy. Its rather embarrassing. Maybe they should rename creative to irrelevant. You mean they look like pictures that might be used in ads designed to appeal to "hormone frenzied teenage boys"? What are you expecting? "Creative" denotes a class of buyer, not a type of photography. Nowadays we tend to refer to creative photography as "art photography". While there is a place in the stock world for this, I don't see that it would make much sense for Alamy to try and sell this as a separate entity. Many images that appear on creative searches are simply ones that creative buyers happen to have previously zoomed, and then only when the same keyword/s are used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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