StanRohrer

To Alamy: Marking my images as "Exclusive To Alamy" no longer has a financial benefit to me. What benefit does Exclusivity have? Is Alamy now/still chasing down miss-uses and wrong licensing?

My accountant gave me a piece of advice - which I'll pass along..... All of business is about relationships. Relationships with suppliers. Relationships with buyers. Relationships within the organization to add value to the product. So I see all the business spreadsheet numbers to be just a measure of how all those strategic relationships are going. Good relationships drive good business numbers. But if the spreadsheets are driving the business decisions, then the relationships are very likely damaged and suffering. These contract changes appear to be the new boss pounding his fist

RM vs RF licenses.... Somewhere in the contract is some text allowing a lot of leeway in license details that can be controlled by Alamy. In my case, all of my images on Alamy are specified RM. I have an RF exclusivity contract with another agency. So, Alamy CANNOT license any of my RM defined images as converted to an RF license. To sell my RM supplied images as RF would cause me a lot of contractual problems and take me directly to a decision fork in the road to bail out of agencies and/or contracts. In my case, a very loose RM license could be (undesirable, but) accepted by me. An RF licens

I think my motorcycle buddy has a system of gloves and socks that plugs into the bike battery and charging system. This is not so time limited on battery life as are gloves with integrated batteries. But I don't think photogs want to be plugged in and tied to a motorcycle. My buddy also has a story of heated socks that developed a short and overheated, burning his leg to a blister, before he could get off the highway and unplug the cord. On his current bike he has heated hand grips so the heated gloves are not so much a cold requirement. Hmmm.... I don't know of any cameras with a heated hand

I just bought some battery operated heated gloves. I'm in southern Ohio USA - not Canada. But with very cold fingers and toes (Raynaud's Syndrome?) I'll give them a try this winter. They were found by a motorcycle riding buddy that takes trips in the cold. So check motorcycle accessories as well as hunting, hiking, skiing, fishing, and outdoors suppliers. Possible search terms: electric, battery, rechargeable, heated, gloves.

My first submission was in early 2003. My first sale was $420 (Alamy price) as I recall. I had dreams of making money. I wish I saw $420 sales today! That $420 might actually be my highest sale of all time - I'd have to go back for a look.

I use iMatch by Photools.com. There is no image retouching/editing capability. It is all cataloging of the image database. Keywording capabilities are nice and can be thesaurus based if you build the thesaurus. I manage 175,000 images now and started in 2003.

I've shot cars on and off since 2003. You might add keywords (if they apply): car, cars, auto, autos, automobile, motorcar, motorcars, transportation, [country of origin, i.e. Italy, Italian, USA, United States], classic, old, vintage, historic, historical, history, antique, nostalgia, restored, custom, customized, hotrod, hot rod, streetrod, street rod, muscle car, race, race car, [colors], [year], [decade i.e. 2010s], [make i.e. Chevrolet, Chevy], vehicle, convertible, coupe, sports car, super car, exotic. Here are a couple keyword helpers. Plug in your basic info and see what ke

I often use a cell phone to record a item on the shelf in a store. But I do it to recall the packaging, model number, shelf price, and the phone GPS location - all as a reference for shopping. I have never been accosted by any of the store employees. If I was approached, I would indicate the above reasons for shopping with a phone and if they didn't want me to consider buying at this store I could erase the image from my phone. I also have used a phone app for price comparisons against Amazon, online, and local stores. We have the technology and I figure this store has to compete. I have not b

Many years ago, when I was shooting a lot of cars, I read an article by an IP attorney about such topics. As applied to my cars and being in the USA, this is my memory (so take it with a grain of salt). I was barely a car photographer and certainly not a lawyer. I could walk into someone's garage and take a pic of a car. The car manufacturer and the paint shop flames would be copyrighted but there is no legal penalty to taking a picture. The copyright problems come from the picture use and especially if it can imply commercial use or commercial recommendations of the copyright hold

I still sell PU. I have not voted. A file size or pixel size file reduction will not help in the cases I've reviewed. I find some of my sales being used on web sites that are more towards commercial and less personal. For example, I found 2 PU sales used on two different (but related) web sites created by the same web site developer company. Alamy extracted a change in pay for one site use and wasn't able to extract a new payment for the other. Alamy said I could chase the 2nd issue. For the difference Alamy got on the first issue I couldn't justify the time nor expense of chasing that second.

Yes, you CAN licence an image as RM on one site and RF on another. However, there are a lot of concerns that make this a bad idea. The sites you use may include competitive restrictions in their contributors agreements. Exclusivity agreements at sites will certainly specify limitations across sites. RM licensing is intended to track uses and a reuse requires a new licence (money). RF is a free for all on usage. You may be competing against yourself in terms of sales and pricing and repeat licensing. Tracking of RM use and infringement will be dif

I went to click and noted the missing forum link. Alamy is messing with my automated brain/click sequence.

If 3/4 of the stop light is in one frame, do I click both frames with the light or just the main frame? Does the light post count for a stop light or just the light fixture itself? This CAPTCHA thing can be a real lesson in frustration.

I see a change of format on the Account Balance page. Color coding is nice for the currency values. However reading the Cleared/Uncleared entries are now a bit tougher than just finding the previous x/o symbols. Please add color coding to Cleared/Uncleared.