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Is it just me or do other people get wound up when they spot a photo with the wrong identification attached (usually animals in my case)?  Surely this can't look good to Alamy's customers who may think us a right bunch of thickos for not being able to tell the difference between a swan and a goose, for example.  I know mistakes will happen - I've been responsible for a few which I have tried to correct when aware of them and would welcome all the help I can get from fellow contributors - but is there any easy way for us to flag up these errors so that the photographer responsible can correct their captions and keywords accordingly.  Photographers Direct have a flagging system in place which I find useful.  What do you all and Alamy think??? :unsure:

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That and deliberate spam. I recently found a contributor who on all their photos had multiple species and multiple locations for animals seen on safari.

I can assure you that that annoys potential buyers no end, and makes them not take an agency seriously.

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I spend enough time working to ensure I correctly do what I can directly control . . .

 

dd

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Policing pix might not be in your job description, and I don't expect anyone to go out of their way to do that, but surely if you stumble across a picture which you know is wrongly captioned, it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience to flag up a correction, would it???  At least it would be nice to have the option... AND, as pointed out by Cryptoprocta, it would give us an opportunity to rid Alamy of the spammers. :wacko:

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I think it would be great if Alamy enabled us to write to the photographer directly or let us notify them (Alamy). It harms the site's reputation when there are such mistakes, muddles up search and would be helpful to have a way to flag mistakes.

 

Here and on another site I had an place mis-identified and someone brought it to my attention. Since being properly identified,  that image has been licensed several times.

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Sending a message direct to the photographer would be time-intensive and probably won't always get the desired result.  I get the feeling that a few contributors don't care too much if the caption is accurate and need a kick in the right direction from someone with more clout than a fellow snapper.... (not to mention spammers and people who copy their keywords wholesale from other photographers).  Like most of us who want to sell photos, I work very hard to get my search info correct and therefore am well-placed to help fix other people's errors, but PMs don't seem to right way to go for me.

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Policing pix might not be in your job description, and I don't expect anyone to go out of their way to do that, but surely if you stumble across a picture which you know is wrongly captioned, it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience to flag up a correction, would it???  At least it would be nice to have the option... AND, as pointed out by Cryptoprocta, it would give us an opportunity to rid Alamy of the spammers. :wacko:

 

If I find errors in captions and keywords (and, yes, there are plenty), it's likely to be in subjects/locations that I'm covering myself. So I'm no more likely to help a director competitor than I am to tell him/her which are my best-selling images. There are plenty of my own errors to find and correct. :unsure:

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I think it would be great if Alamy enabled us to write to the photographer directly or let us notify them (Alamy). It harms the site's reputation when there are such mistakes, muddles up search and would be helpful to have a way to flag mistakes.

 

Here and on another site I had an place mis-identified and someone brought it to my attention. Since being properly identified,  that image has been licensed several times.

 

You can. Click on the photographer's avatar >>> look at the top right of the page >>>> click on "Send me a message".

 

Cheers,

Philippe

 

 

Philippe, I guess you are talking about forum avatar, correct? What if I am in your gallery and during watching beautiful images that you have, I find one with completely wrong caption/ keywords and don't know who you are, how to contact you to let you know about your mistake?

 

 

And in general - to help or not to help others. Isn't it right that more clients will come to use good agency with fine keyworded images than searching through the mess in pain? I think it's in our all goal to encourage clients and help to use Alamy images search tool.

Lately I was looking for some flower by it's name and found lots, I mean loads of wrong flowers under the same name. I should get (for example) 100 result but got 500 results... As a client I would be discouraged to use it here.

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Ok, sometimes I do the search also to see if there are many similar images to know if there is any sense to upload or already create new. Lately I've seen a very unique flower and I knew it's name, etc. Just wanted to know if it is very popular or not known here really. It has not much to do with competition. Actually it's opposite - I try to create more niche images, than multiply what is already here.

And sometimes I just like to watch beautiful images, seriously.

 

And I think, that if some people do not want to help others, then don't, but let me (us, others) do the thing, so we all could help Alamy to be the best possible place.

 

 

I'm very sorry for the hard time you have there. It touches every other country... :(

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There are, literally, millions of images in the Alamy collection which have wrong keywords, or 'spammed' keywords, or are missing the keywords they ought to have. Good luck to anyone hoping to extend the hand of friendship (a laudable aim, after all) by pointing out other people's errors. But the well-taken pix, with the accurate and appropriate keywords, will rise towards the top... and the second-rate pix, with the poor keywords, will tend to sink towards the bottom... and that, too, is the way it ought to be...

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Unfortunately this is not something that many people appear to take seriously.  I wrote to member services about it some time ago but didn't get a response.  I used a couple of examples - one of them is a search for "tree frog Madagascar".  Out of 208 results, 43, all from the same agency, are frogs that are not from Madagascar.  This is 20% of the total.  Worse still, the keywords on all the ones I checked include "Madagascar" and "Costa Rica", i.e. it was not an honest mistake of identification.  I would imagine that examples like this must affect Alamy's credibility.

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From what I saw today, the erroneously keyworded images appear at the top along with all the others.  How could they not???  Not terribly professional........... :(

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I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand incorrect naming - whether its plants, animals, places or even people - must detract from the professional reputation of Alamy. The buyers may not be sufficiently knowledgeable to positively ID a rare species or unusual variety but the chances are that some of their end consumers will be. That sort of feedback is bound to reflect back on Alamy. On the other hand the ranking system acts as a form of evolution in action, winnowing out the poor and inaccurate keyworders. The problem is it's slow - and the damage could be done by then.

 

Some sort of flagging system would certainly be useful. Personally, if I've got an ID wrong I'd like to know. Nobody is perfect. But I suspect the worst offenders would be totally indifferent to anything short of suspension by Alamy. And that's not going to happen.

 

Edit: Just to prove I'm definitely not perfect I've just found I'd incorrectly named a recent upload. I'll blame it on old age and a slip of the keyboard - but I could easily have missed it if I didn't regularly check what I upload. It's the people who don't check that cause the problems.

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I think a flagging system would be a good idea. 

You can be helpful and also help deal with keyword spam - both laudable efforts. 

My heart goes out to all those in Belgium today. Horrible. I can understand Phillippe's distraction. 

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I find keyword spamming particularly annoying. Recently I came across a contributor who had keyworded just about every borough and neighborhood in New York City, for hundreds of images.

Maybe he's a tourist who had no idea where he was so he just included everything?

I doubt anyone wants to wade through so many irrelevant photos when looking for something slightly more specific.

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There are, literally, millions of images in the Alamy collection which have wrong keywords, or 'spammed' keywords, or are missing the keywords they ought to have. Good luck to anyone hoping to extend the hand of friendship (a laudable aim, after all) by pointing out other people's errors. But the well-taken pix, with the accurate and appropriate keywords, will rise towards the top... and the second-rate pix, with the poor keywords, will tend to sink towards the bottom... and that, too, is the way it ought to be...

Of course, it's the way it ought to be*, but far too often, it's not how it is.

I've seen lots of searches where spammed or wrongly keyworded images are above many properly keyworded images.

Same as with searches for Joe Bloggs often having photos of Joe Smith and Jane Bloggs above actual Joe Bloggs (type examples, not a literal search), or photos correctly captioned "crowd waiting to see Joe Bloggs" (without JB actually in the photo) above photos of Joe Bloggs.

It's the way the system works.

 

*and even if it did work that way, it would take months or years for the images to rise to the top, buyers being hacked off meanwhile.

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Oooh.... so it's competitiveness versus not ticking off the customers then? :P  You're all so mean and ruthless.............. :D

 

well . . . yes :-)

 

There is also a very practical aspect:

 

If we’re talking about only 1 in 100 images, then I’d suggest there is no problem (or the “problem” is exaggerated).

 

If however we’re talking about 1 in 10 images, then there is a problem that could certainly tick-off customers.

 

BUT . . . IF it is indeed 1 in 10, and IF 100 of us contacted one errant contributor a day, every day, every year, and IF every errant contributor contacted did indeed clean up their images, and IF not one single new image was ever added to Alamy again, we would cut the offending images down to only 1 in 20 in just under 100 years.

 

And if it is "only" 1 in 20 images we're talking about, then we’d halve the problem (to "only" 1 in 40) in just under 49 years.

 

If there really is a practical, effective, and timely fix for the issue of misinformation, to the point where there would be a noticeable change to the advantage of ticked-off customers, flagging offenders as you stumble upon them ain't it . . .

 

However, banning any contributor who from today contributes images that do indeed spam keywords might at the very least slow down the perpetuation of the practise--at the very least perhaps not making it any worse may be the most that can be done, even though that may be a tad harsh for simple mistakes (but it would certainly focus the mind when keywording) :) 

 

dd

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Maybe we don't need to fix ALL errors, not in a hurry anyway.  I've found errors in images which appear in the first row of a search and in the "creative" selections (maybe "creative" means creative with keywords!).  Getting these fixed would be a good start as these are the photos most customers will see first.  :unsure:

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I started a thread about the same thing last year: http://discussion.alamy.com/index.php?/topic/4717-correcting-others-mistakes/

Some mistakes are genuine, some as a result of laziness or spamming.

It's in everyone's interest that captions and keywords on Alamy are accurate and I would welcome a better system than simply sending a message to the photographer.

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