Steve Valentia

I don't think my zooms are "down". as mentioned, I've probably sold as many zoomed as non-zoomed images, in the 14 or so years I've been with Alamy and that doesn't seem to have changed significantly.

Hope I was helpful Lori. Keep up with the key-wording, even at the expense of sending in more images. You may have some great images but if no one can see them; they are of no use to anyone.

It's a good feeling, getting a sale and even better is seeing your images in print. I still get that buzz 35 years or more after my first published image (and I'm now associate editor of a camera magazine). My best advice, though, is to concentrate on two other S words. Not "sales", but "shooting" and "submissions". Keep taking photographs (with an eye on the content requests and blogs Alamy puts out) and keep submitting them. Don't worry about the sales, the more you shoot and submit, the more you sell.

Yes, that could definitely explain it. But, I'm guessing there must be a 'fail-safe' for this, otherwise the feed would surely be flooded with US date-stamped images stuck at the front for weeks.

Another one dropped in this morning; $50. Very close to breaking my all-time record for sales in one year with 6 months to go. Rock on!

When I read the OP I thought that the issue would be about the captioning and tags on the image. They are probably some of the worst I have seen. But if they are typical of others around, then I can sleep more easily about my own.

I reported an issue to the news editors, at the weekend, that at least one contributor, A stock agency, is using a future date stamp on their news images. When I noticed it, at least two images that arrived on the feed had a date of 5th December 2018. This meant that those images stayed at the top of the feed. I haven't looked in the last few days to see if they are still there, but it is something to watch out for as it detracts from all the correctly dated images arriving.

At least half the sales I make are from images that do not appear in my zoom list. I do think, though, that since I started making more regular contributions, after a long hiatus, both my zooms and sales have picked up to the point where I'm disappointed if I don't see a sale every 2 or 3 days. In my "down time" I was lucky to see a sale every month. Last year, I broke my all-time record for sales in a year. This year, I have 7 sales to go to break that record and 6 months to do it in. Not sure at all if there a connection, but as J Paul Getty said..."the harder I work, the luckier I get!"

Thanks Paul. This is a complex question, and the answer varies depending on which country you fly the drone in. It is usually more to do with whether you can fly the drone for commercial purposes, rather than sell the photographs from it. In the US and UK, you will need a commercial drone license to fly a drone for "work" (that is; you fly expecting a fee for your services), which usually involves undertaking a course. In Ireland - where I live - all drones should be registered with the IAA, but there is no such thing as a "professional" or "commercial" drone pilot. However, there are restrictions on how and where you can fly the drone. If you want to fly outside of those restrictions (this may be necessary to undertake commercial work) you will need permission from the IAA, who may grant you a license for that flight; and you have to attend a course to be in a position to apply for the license. Oddly, in the US (not sure about the UK), it is legal to sell images or video taken with a drone used initially for hobby purposes and not for commercial use, after the fact. So, if you fly the drone for fun and then someone wants to buy a photo you took with it, you're not breaking the law.

Really? Where did that figure come from? There are far too many variables to pin stock success down to 800 images for regular sales. 10 000 images of an undesirable subject, or of a desirable one badly photographed still wouldn't be enough.

This was my first Alamy sale, made in September 2005, 6 months after I joined. I'm not sure of how many images I had contributed at the time, but I reckon it was less than 300. It's a RF sale that made $248. It shows a barrow stuck in manure. Not a bad analogy for my photography career at present.

I thought I'd try (God forgive me), a microstock firm last year, for the first time in a very long photography career. So far 60 sales, netting $18.76. 3 Alamy sales in May 2018 so far, netting $200. I am also very close to breaking my all time record for sales in a year, and there's more than half of the year to go! You have around 900 images for sale, which, in the grand Alamy scheme of things, is smaller than half a drop of water in several large oceans. My advice is try harder and spend even more time on it than you have so far, and you may (may) get a sale or two.

First drone image to sell and a 3 figure sale from one of 15 weather news sales this month - from the same shoot (mix of camera and drone).

Thanks for the reply Wim, it was actually your suggestion about the tablet and pen that got me to buy one, but I'm just admiring it unplugged most of the time as I found it less effective than the mouse. Probably because I'm not used to it. I have over 6000 images with Alamy, contributed since 2004, and hundreds of thousands of others scattered across numerous external hard drives. It would take far longer to find the Alamy images to re-upload them than to work slowly on the re-keywording as I am now. I did get a spreadsheet, but again not being familiar with it slowed me down. I found that I had to keep comparing the uploaded images with the image ID on the spreadsheet to know which one I was keywording. I've tried the dragging method and this has some effect. Occasionally though I get error messages about having too many supertags! I wish!

Not really, no. Lightroom and Photoshop ACR can handle JPG's almost as well as RAW files these days. Unless there is a need for major digital manipulation of the image then I don't think JPG's are a problem. I'm a committed RAW only shooter (since I went digital from medium format film cameras in 2005), but I have recently been setting my cameras to JPG and RAW especially for news shots as the LR phone app only uses JPG's. This also work well for on-the-spot none news uploads via my phone. I had 3 accepted by QC only yesterday.