Phil Robinson

You may have a point there.

That £3 was a good investment after all

My most useful pseduo is the default I use exclusively for all new uploads and news images. When image manager changed (a long time ago now) I had trouble finding the newly uploaded images that needed keywording etc. Now everything I upload has the same pseudo - news and new stock - and only when I am happy with captions, keywords and annotating, do I assign the images to their relevant pseudo. Live News images remain there, until and I decide to chose to properly annotate them or go back to the RAW file and produce a better quality version of an image for stock, when I can delete the first upload.

I try to take vertical shots that way in the first place, but I do often end up 'finding' a better vertical composition with a landscape shot, so it's useful if you have enough pixels to cut the ends off.

Most cameras have far more resolution than you need. One advantage of higher resolution is the ability to crop. I like to be able to crop a horizontal image to vertical format (and v/v) so extra pixels can come in handy sometimes.

I agree, I'm sure that's what happened. I just don't want my images used for that little. I know people who have opted out of the newspaper scheme or distribution for the same reason - those sales are bigger and a serious part of my income, even if I don't always like the fees.

In the past, regarding distributor sales and the newspaper scheme, I have always taken the 'something is better than nothing' view, thinking that my opting in or out is not going to cause tremors in the stock photography world. I have drawn the line at the Novel Abuse scheme and opted out last month. The sales I was getting were to a huge, very well-funded website with thousands of articles and $1 or less for use until the end of time was just wrong. When the Novel Use scheme was launched it was said to cover licenses that didn't fit any of the normal patterns - I think use on a fridge magnet or a single mug were the examples given. The sales I have had recently could very easily be covered by an existing licensing model - website use - and the prices were unacceptable. On the plus side, I have been happier with average prices recently - I've seen more of the 40-50 rather than 20-30, and a few more $$$ than in the past.

I agree - in fact I think it is where the exclusive box used to be. I was going to check that I haven't mistakenly ticked it instead of 'exclusive' but 'public domain' doesn't appear one of the attributes that can be searched.

Some can be surprising. I photograph a lot of politicians, as do a lot of other people. The ones everybody's heard of are very well covered buy I am frequently surprised, when I get a back-bencher wandering around Westminster, to discover that Alamy have no/very few images of him/her, even moderately well-known ones. The best way to find niches is to photograph EVERYTHING and find out what sells because nobody else has photographed it.

As mentioned above, if you create a new psuedo, it will start with an average ranking. If yours is below average, that might help, for a while. I think the way Alamy ranks photographers/images has changed and I'm not sure if anyone really knows how it works these days. The average CTR on Alamy last month was .57 (about normal) my better-performing pseudos were at 1.3 and 1.09 - the worst were .28 and .07! It's swings and roundabouts.

Any of you on here......?

I don't think it really affects sales but if you cover several distinct styles / subjects in your photos it can give you some useful information about how well they perform compared to one another. I have several pseudos for different categories and find it very useful to find how they compare. Also, if, like you, you have thousands of images online, it splits them up into more manageable collections.

I have just found quite a few from November that are still uncleared - distributor sales to China and Japan. And - perhaps more surprising - 5 UK newspaper sales from 30th January (The Sun, I think) and another 5 newspaper sales from February (The Sun, I think) I think perhaps it is time Mr Murdoch was sent a reminder

Please make 'personal use' and 'presentation and newsletters' sales UNREFUNDABLE. There is absolutely no way of knowing whether an image has been used after it has been downloaded (and refunded). Obviously it would have to be made very clear to customers before they pay that the sale could not be refunded, and that if they buy a pic of a Ferrari, they are buying the licence to use the image and not a £200,000 sportscar, which seems to be excuse given for most refunds. And if a company spend $10 on an image for a Powerpoint, it is not unreasonable to expect them to write off the $10 if the presentation disappointingly never comes to fruition.

....when you can't photograph the Labour Party EU election launch in the next town because you are invigilating a photography exam in the school where you used to work because it is a few hours of guaranteed minimum wage.

Sales don't get reported anywhere 'as they happen'. They get reported when they are invoiced by Alamy, which can be a while after publication. The money turns up later, when the invoice has cleared. As said above, most papers report in the last couple of days in the month - the same month if you are lucky, more commonly the following one. But making any sales at all with only 140 images online is quite amazing

Blowers, brushes and old lens-cleaning cloths. The moist single-use tissues you can get for cleaning glasses are really good for a lot things too (including computer screens).

You have some really great images - especially the insects and frogs - but I'd agree that more information in the captions would be a huge improvement. Latin names at the very least and where the animal is from, even if photographed in captivity. I have never had much success with selling natural history on Alamy but there are people who have, and most of your images are better than mine. Good luck

It can't do any harm putting it on sale - without identification it probably won't sell, but some expert in Cambodian birds might do a search for 'Cambodian birds' and recognise it - you never know. Main thing is don't put the wrong name. There are far too many incorrectly captioned wildlife pics on Alamy already - some of them spectacularly wrong.

It looks like it could be some species of Rock Thrush - possible immature or female? It certainly looks thrushy

I have always used Elements. For basic editing and tweaking levels, exposure, contrast, colour and general cleaning up etc. it is perfectly fine. I imagine if you are into much more creative arty stuff with loads of manipulation that takes ages to work on, you'd be better off with something else,.

Not sure how photos of Frank Sinatra in 1974 or Tom Sellick in 1996 deserve a place on the Live News feed today - even if they have added today's date to the caption.

Tagging certainly depends on subject matter and some subjects require more keywords than other.

I have no problems with the concept of 'discoverability'. If it was measured by how many of the fields - mandatory and optional - had been filled in, it could be very useful. But as it stands it is in direct conflict with what used to be the thinking behind the whole Alamy ranking system - which rewarded relevant keywording and discouraged keyword spamming.

Ignore the bar. Just ignore it. Really - ignore it. I'm a big fan of almost everything Alamy do (almost) but this 'discoverability' is simply a waste of time. Use keywords that are relevant to the image. The more the better IF they are relevant. NEVER add more just to change the colour of the bar. I have nearly 40,000 images on Alamy - 55 of them are 'optimised', about 1500 have 'good discoverability'. I'm OK with that.