No Sales. What can be the issue?

[Alexandre Fagundes]

 

 

 

 

Thanks all for the kind advices

I don't have a calibrated monitor, this is one thing i have to do quickly. My images are JPGs OOC processed with VSCO LR presets which enhanced dark areas and contrast.

I love the final effect but i didn't consider most whites are gone so they're not suitable for stock actually.

For keywording / quantity i agree with your advices, i focused on quantity without considering all the right things you said, all correct.

I don't know really how it's possible to manage 100k+ pics with PP , keywording, uploading , move all keywords from LR fields to Alamy fields. Your workflow is wonderful for my skills.

My plan is to re-caption and re-keyword my 3500 pics online and use less PP in future or use a better preset, i know it would be better to shoot in RAW but i don't want to manage Tbs of data.

Sorry Kodakovic, but this is a professional business for the best photographers so you need to do your best (you are competing against millions of images).

That means a good camera, RAW files and a good processing software.

Yes, you will need to invest time and have tons of HD space not to mention SD/CF cards in your camera to fit the extra memory.

And besides that lots of time studying and perfecting your processing skills.

 

 

Alexandre

i AM a professional photographer and i KNOW what a business it (not only photography).

I HAVE a "good" camera , raw files vs jpgs is something forums debate from the beginning of the digital age and i OWN Lightroom.

ah..ok.... it's 25 years that i "study my processing skills". how old are you (just to know) ?

Is an innocent question like mine to start selling here in Alamy something people need to use to teach others how to live?

If that's the Alamy spirit, i'll be better go elsewhere

 

 

 

Hi Kodakovic,

Sorry if I upset you, I was really just trying to help.

I am 49 BTW, 

 

 

I'll give RAW another chance for the next months or years of course.

I own a Fuji X-E1 which has a spectacular sensor (without the Bayer filter) giving a very wide dynamic range and over the top sharpness.

Betty, X-T1 is better of course, they improved it.

therefore, in the past, this sensor is the main reason while i switched to JPGs only.

I probably made a "non-professional" move doing that, so now i can recover my mistake re-trying with RAW files.

I know how to manage multiple hard drive since i have 20 years of experience as an IT guy. I'm backing up my data either locally or internet just to avoid a local backup data failure.

I agree with all the advices about keywording and captioning... one thing that's unbelievable is that searching "Your Images" of the last month or from the beginning i'm here 80% of the searches were really of keywords actually in the scene and fully describing the image itself.

That doesn't mean anything and you're right pointing at batch editing which is not great idea.

 

 

 

Hi Kodakovic, I know about Fuji and its breakthrough technology sensor that doesnt use a Bayer array filter.

This is a fantastic technology that is supposed to give superb images.

The thing about RAW and jpg though happens "after the fact", so, you are letting the camera convert its RAW unprocessed file to a jpg, it will do the best way it can, so, the way Fuji guys programed it (you might have some tweaks to choose in the camera software like vivid, contrast, sharpness, etc,) that´s you telling the camera how you want it to convert the file, but in the end is the camera software that does it.

If you process it later, you will choose all of that later, including color temperature and will have much wider control on the details of your images (like the example I gave you on the other post where you had a dark foreground and bright sky).

That doesnt mean you will have better images, it depends on you and the conversion software, but normally you can have better results because computers have much more processing power than a camera and you have a lot of controls to make your images look better.

 

You can live without RAW, though, that´s true.

You will just have to be extra careful about color temperature before taking the pictures, which I think you are doing because of the nice quality of your images, 

 

Another thing I dont know is how well the photograph softwares handle the processing of the FUJI sensor, its something you should try first before moving to RAW or ask the Forum for other people using your camera, ask which software process it better.

Last but not least, I dont know the size of the unprocessed images with your sensor, they might be even bigger than a Bayer sensor, 

 

Let us know your thoughts on that and sorry for the harsh start of this conversation.

[Ed Rooney]

 

Spot on. Subjective terms should mostly be avoided

Why?

 

1300 searches last year include the word 'beautiful'

 

km

 

 

 

I answered why in my comments. I'm not objecting to the term "beautiful." As I said, I avoid most subjective adjectives when keywording (no rules are 100%). And 1300 searches or 130,000 searches would be irrelevant and even harmful if they don't lead to zooms and sales. There are 38 hits on "beautiful red snapper," by the way. Sadly none are of you. 

[KODAKovic]

I took some time to let the stats reveal some more data on my situation.

It's true i keyworded wrong many times but for the last 3 months i have views for the "right" keywords, meaning all my views are of images which should be shown for these keywords.

More to say, i have way too many views, probably because (as some here suggested) i uploaded too many pics for topic.

For i.e. "Palazzo Vecchio florence" i have 139 views, 'cause i've uploaded many pics of my city.

So, why sales are not coming for these keywords?

Too much competition? Bad images by the way?

May be my images are shown but low ranking so buyers prefer others?

 

thanks again

[John Mitchell]

Those are tough questions to answer. The marketplace is super competitive now. I'm finding that it's mainly the images in my collection that no one else has that are licensing.

[M.Chapman]

I took a look at the 139 images you have of Palazzo Vecchio florence. I have several observations.

 

1) You're competing with over 6,000 images of this subject

2) Your collection of 139 includes quite a lot of black and white versions - not sure why - which probably isn't helping

3) You images start to appear on page 5 out of 62 (100 images per page). This is not bad, and suggests a reasonable Alamy rank. But does mean the viewer looked at over 400 images before reaching yours. As others have already said you really need to tighten your keywording. At the moment your overall collection contains way too many totally irrelevant keywords. This is will be hurting your Alamy ranking. With a specific search like this you should aim to be on page 1 with good, accurately keyworded images. 

4) Some of your images should never have passed QC, e.g. FY089G and FY088R which are both very blurred, even as on screen previews. If a prospective customer clicks on your collection and sees these they may doubt the quality of the other images and may not bother to risk downloading any in high res to find out. You should remove all keywords from any such blurry images and then delete them from your collection. (Alternatively ask members services to immediately remove them for you). They will never sell, and are just hurting your ranking and reputation as a photographer.

5) Other than that, many of your images look OK, so it's down to buyer choice, be patient.

 

Main message is that it's a competitive market, if you take the the advice already given in this long thread, then you will improve your chances of selling. 

[marc]

You have not taken the good advice given here.   So it seems a bit redundant to keep asking for more input.

 

From what I can see you need to:

 

Edit your collection and leave only the professionally framed and exposed images.   You have a mixture of well shot material alongside a lot of photos that are at off centre, that cut off limbs or tops of buildings or have no head room or caption space. None of these images will sell when set against professional images of Italian tourist cities that have years of extensive coverage.  You could shift the images that don't work into a second collection if you can't bear taking them off the site.

 

Look at magazines, papers and websites. Ask yourself if your images would work there and are likely editorial subjects.  Shoot these kinds of pictures. Look for gaps in the market.

 

If you don't fix your keywording, you will never sell, however good your pictures.   Much of your keywording is destroying your chances of selling.

[AlessandraRC]

 

A beginning stock photographer should look at Alamy's archive and do a search for subjects he/she covers. And then ask the very important question - "If I were a customer, which image would I buy? My own?" If not - because you find way better ones - then one shouldn't wonder why their sales suck

 

Cheers,

Philippe

 

 

This is a good advice, but also, and perhaps more important, is your ranking, or the ranking of your images, so they can be found, and compared with, others on the same subject. Lots of great pictures are on page 12 of a search. Does the customer even look there?

[KODAKovic]

Thanks guys.

I'm not a person which doesn't follow tips , i'm just trying to understand and better understand how to integrate tips with my experience.

I'm starting with the consideration that if people "view" my images for the "right" keywords (not spam keywords) they are properly keyworded and my ranking is high in such cases.

Right?

May be i have a % of images which are viewed for wrong keywords (read it "spam") or may be in  some viewed images there are wrong keywords but both are a small % of my stats.

It seems as some pointed out a problem with too many pictures for a certain topic or bad images mixed with good ones my sales issue.

Some of you guys are saying that my pictures show up at a lower page in search results after many images of other contributors; that's correct but i'm referring to the images "viewed" somehow (may be page 100 but still viewed) and i'm wondering why he didn't buy them or why he didn't zoom them.

[Allan Bell]

Thanks guys.

 

Some of you guys are saying that my pictures show up at a lower page in search results after many images of other contributors; that's correct but i'm referring to the images "viewed" somehow (may be page 100 but still viewed) and i'm wondering why he didn't buy them or why he didn't zoom them.

 

 

Could be simply that the buyer did not find what he/she was looking for. It happens.

 

Allan

[M.Chapman]

I'm starting with the consideration that if people "view" my images for the "right" keywords (not spam keywords) they are properly keyworded and my ranking is high in such cases.

Right?

 

Nope.

 

Alamy don't disclose a great amount of detail about the inner workings of their system. But based on what I've read, the following are the basic principles.

 

The Alamy Rank for a pseudonym depends on a number of factors

• The sales achieved by the Pseudonym
• The CTR% (Click Through Rate = Zooms/View as a percentage) for the pseudonym.

There have been discussions about whether Alamy rank also depends on your level of recent activity level (e.g. are you still uploading new images) and maybe the size of your collection, but I don't think there's any evidence to support this. If you want to gain an insight into your Alamy rank, you can try the "BHZ" game. (Search for BHZ in the forum to find out more). Alamy say that the results of the BHZ game aren't useful but, in my experience, large variations in my BHZ position correlate quite well with changes in the number of views I get per month.

 

The position which an image appears in the customer's search results depends on numerous factors. I think the first two are not disputed.

• Images that contain matching keywords (to the customer search) in their Essential Keyword field are "rated" more highly than those that only contain matching keywords in the Main keyword field, and those are rated more highly than those that only contain matching keywords in the Comprehensive keyword field. It also matters if the keywords appear in the Caption field, but I'm not sure of the relative importance attached to this. More highly "rated" images will appear higher in the search results. 
• The Alamy Rank of the Pseudonym that owns the image. The better the Alamy rank of the pseudonym, the higher their images will appear in the search results.

The following may (or may not be!) other factors that are included.

• Images where the order and proximity of the keywords most closely match the order of the keywords entered by the customer are rated more highly.
• Images with fewer non-matching keywords may be rated more highly? I've never tested this one!
• Images that have sold before may be rated more highly? This doesn't appear to be the case with my images.
• If lots of images from the same pseudonym are equally rated then a "dispersal algorithm" will spread them out so they don't appear in a solid block in the results (does this still happen?)

Hopefully you can now see that accurate and "sophisticated" key-wording is important to achieving success.

 

You asked again why didn't they buy any of your images of Palazzo Vecchio Florence, even though they viewed them

• As Allan said, maybe they didn't find any images they liked (from you any contributor).
• Maybe they did find images from you that they liked. Remember - it can take 3 months or longer for a sale to appear. 
• Maybe they preferred images from another contributor. They had already looked at 400 images by the time they reached yours. Take a look at those images and compare them to yours? Are they better?

You can get some insight into whether customers are seriously interested your images by studying the Zoom statistics against your images in Alamy Measures. Look at the total number of zooms agains a particular search term, and check how many if any of them are yours.  

 

As I said before, I think you need to urgently improve your key-wording and delete images that are of poor technical quality.

[AlessandraRC]

Since my first days here on Alamy some of my pictures have appeared on the first pages of the search results whereas others I could not even find no matter what I did. To the latter I kept changing the key wording until I could find them. Some of it has to do with where the keywords are, as Chapman pointed out. For instance, I have an image of a door and a window that are blue, on a white wall. If I type "window door blue white" on the search engine that images comes up on the first page, together with a few others that are very relevant to the keywords. If I type in blue door and window only, it is off the first page, but some of the relevant photos I had seen on the previous search are still there. More than half of the battle here is to be found, since there are 19,589 photos of a blue door and window. If I add the word "Brazil"- where the photo was taken- I get a set of similar doors and windows, perhaps the same architectural style, only 83 photos, bam. So I don't know. What the customer is looking for, how he/she is looking, and then finally may be you get a chance to chosen, or not.

 

 

[M.Chapman]

Since my first days here on Alamy some of my pictures have appeared on the first pages of the search results whereas others I could not even find no matter what I did. 

 

 

It should always be possible to find your image if you have entered a matching set of keywords. If you are sure it's not there, it's worth posting an example in the forum. Sometimes there's a simple explanation, but sometimes it reveals a problem with Alamy's search engine. This has happened before. See the forum threads here and here.

 

At the moment the search engine seems to be OK, but Alamy are in the process of refining it, so we may find different or unusual results over the next few days.

[Colblimp]

As a professional photographer, you should be shooting RAW - no ifs or buts.  Lack of time and not enough storage are extremely poor reasons not to shoot RAW.  JPEG is for the likes of Ken Rockwell, not a member of the Alamy family!

 

As for your keywords, enough has been said about that already but your images?  Just look at G42E3E, G42E7F - no words needed!  That said, there are some nice images in your port.  As others have said, before you press the shutter button think who will buy this image and why will they buy it.

 

Good luck and ask for advice any time!

[wiskerke]

As a professional photographer, you should be shooting RAW - no ifs or buts.  Lack of time and not enough storage are extremely poor reasons not to shoot RAW.  JPEG is for the likes of Ken Rockwell, not a member of the Alamy family!

 

As for your keywords, enough has been said about that already but your images?  Just look at G42E3E, G42E7F - no words needed!  That said, there are some nice images in your port.  As others have said, before you press the shutter button think who will buy this image and why will they buy it.

 

Good luck and ask for advice any time!

 

-This image could have imperfections as it’s either historical or reportage-

 

Maybe use the balloon image for a How would you keyword this?  post.

 

wim

[Julie Edwards]

As a professional photographer, you should be shooting RAW - no ifs or buts.  Lack of time and not enough storage are extremely poor reasons not to shoot RAW.  JPEG is for the likes of Ken Rockwell, not a member of the Alamy family!

 

 

 

And 98% of news photographers when seconds matter ...  Sweeping statements are very dangerous as there are ALWAYS exceptions  ;-) 

[Alex Ramsay]

Nothing is predictable in this game - I recently sold (for a decent price) a very mundane image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, taken years ago on a camera that would certainly be considered unacceptable these days. My shot is so similar to the rest that I cannot even find it among the 9000 other pics of this subject. But somehow it suited the needs of a picture editor somewhere . . .

[KODAKovic]

Thanks all, i'm gonna take care of all advices received

[AlessandraRC]

 

Since my first days here on Alamy some of my pictures have appeared on the first pages of the search results whereas others I could not even find no matter what I did. 

 

 

It should always be possible to find your image if you have entered a matching set of keywords. If you are sure it's not there, it's worth posting an example in the forum. Sometimes there's a simple explanation, but sometimes it reveals a problem with Alamy's search engine. This has happened before. See the forum threads here and here.

 

At the moment the search engine seems to be OK, but Alamy are in the process of refining it, so we may find different or unusual results over the next few days.

 

 

 

I was not referring to the search engine. What I did was to post an image, wait a month or so, and looking at it, try to find it. Not typing the keywords in it necessarily. I found out that I often did not have the most important keywords in the pictures to be able to find them. Now I do check them periodically- the new ones- and I have found out one or two things about key wording by doing that.

[M.Chapman]

 

 

Since my first days here on Alamy some of my pictures have appeared on the first pages of the search results whereas others I could not even find no matter what I did. 

 

 

It should always be possible to find your image if you have entered a matching set of keywords. If you are sure it's not there, it's worth posting an example in the forum. Sometimes there's a simple explanation, but sometimes it reveals a problem with Alamy's search engine. This has happened before. See the forum threads here and here.

 

At the moment the search engine seems to be OK, but Alamy are in the process of refining it, so we may find different or unusual results over the next few days.

 

 

 

I was not referring to the search engine. What I did was to post an image, wait a month or so, and looking at it, try to find it. Not typing the keywords in it necessarily. I found out that I often did not have the most important keywords in the pictures to be able to find them. Now I do check them periodically- the new ones- and I have found out one or two things about key wording by doing that.

 

 

Are you saying you're not referring to the Alamy search engine? Are you referring to Google search results instead or to Google reverse image results (you said not typing the keywords) or something else? I'm confused now.