Cryptoprocta

They have a long history of this. It's shocking that Alamy continues to allow them to self-report, and rewards them with the lower prices payable down the line, instead of penalising them for not keeping proper records.

As I've said before, it annoys me no end when I find my files of certain subjects way down in the search, doomed to permanent obscurity, but many pics on the first page are irrelevant to the search term. And before anyone says, yes certain other subjects have good positioning, but it's not swings and roundabouts, as both my low positioned and high positioned images are correctly keyworded. (Still doesn't stop poor connections of unrelated words, of course :-() I should also say that a wildlife organisation had a wrongly labelled image of what was a very obsure insect endemic to some small and distant island: the file subject was closely related, but not the claimed one and rather surprisingly several readers wrote in to point it out: and they don't use that stock agency now.

Funnily enough, I always say I'd like to see a plan with just Photoshop!

He hasn't blogged since 2017, and has kept himself very low in the past couple of years. He hadn't even updated his Fb page since April 2017, but he has one post from March 2019 saying: "We listened! New reduced price on all images. $33 USD - all sizes! Also. 20% bonus this month. If you buy $250 USD to top up your account, you will get $300 USD on your account to spend on images or videos! Hurray!" So he's also having to adjust prices downwards, presumably to match the market.

Possibly what has happened is that the buyer bought your image and so many others that they were due a 'retrospective discount'. You could contact Support with a query.

And this is a competitive advantage for Alamy, and as such to be applauded. Sadly, it can also lead to unreported sales, which Alamy doesn't penalise heavily enough.

Nope: currently c52% of last year's sales, but c30% of the cash.

Thanks for the spot!

1. It's not needed for editorial, and as it's likely that the location or things they're wearing would need property releases, I can't see that there could be much, if any, advantage in getting model releases. If they were models and you'd got them to wear generic clothes* etc and had a property release for the location or none was needed, that's different, but these would be commercial images. Financial advantage? Hard to say. Is Alamy a great place for selling commerical stock? Isn't it all about the discount the buyer has negotiated, and not about the image? Practical? If they were strangers, probably not. Unless they were all a group and were willing to wait for you to discuss all the ins and outs of what implications there are in signing releases. If they were separate, by the time you'd gone over all the possibilities and answered any questions with the first person, the others would usually have moved on. *But Alamy seems require that just about any 'thing' needs a release, so even that might not work. Other agencies, while being wary of IP issues, aren't quite so strict in that regard. 2. Sorry, my sales here are so incredibly random, I can't offer any useful advice on this.

So, the advantage is that the caption is longer, which in various circumstances could be useful (but could also result in a lot of erroneous search 'hits'). The disadvantage is that like Live News, the image will forever have a note attached to it that it might not be up to QC standards, even if it is. Hmmm.

11 sales, but a net total of only $40.86, i.e. average of $3.71 net. All exclusive.

Same here, except my zooms have gone up in the past week.

Great day; thanks for arranging it, Iain.

So sorry to catch up with this news, Betty. Glad that you can think of the beauties of nature in the midst of your sadness.

But of course Getty is selling it and isn't closed down: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/in-this-handout-photo-provided-by-the-national-science-news-photo/1136111087 (VCG haven't a clue about copyright in general. At one point they were giving away images (without the authors' permission) for free because they thought that would increase buying custom.)

Indeed. I'm sorry - I was afraid you were delusional!!!

Why?

You can opt out of NU, but my super low price sales were not in NU, but a bulk discount deal. Nothing at all to do with the actual photos sold. Inchiquin is right - for Alamy, it's a good lump sum.

I'm now - having thought about it - wondering how big an issue this is. I'm hoping Alamy noticed that very few buyers were ticking the 'unaltered' box when searching before they made it that we didn't have to tick 'digitally altered' on submissions, and decided these few buyers didn't matter (always a slippery slope - that has historically been a big problem with my micro, constantly making changes because "Only a tiny percentage of our customers were using that feature", but all these small percentages add up). I know that back in the day textbook publishers' main reason for not using micro (when there was a larger price differential than nowadays) was, as I stated above, that they couldn't know if images had been set up or altered. Whereas now at least one of them has strict rules about digital changes (dust bunnies and CA OK) and captioning. Is that now a disadvantage for Alamy? I have to say that now that we don't have to declare digitally altered, I often do a quick sweep taking out bird droppings, litter, minor vandalism, small parts of a person who walked into the edge of my photo etc. But there is now no way of indicating that a pic has been altered much more than that, photos combined, etc etc.

Can Canadian Alamy buyers not pay in Can$? I can only see UK£ prices when I look at files here, not US$.

That's really how I feel. Plus keep 100%. 🙂

That might work for a specialist agency, but they would thus lose less usual images, and hence perhaps the buyers who had use for these images. That could even apply to news agencies if they culled people who lived in a particular locality, not much required for news, but something could happen there.

Yes, I'm pretty sure that's what happens with some UK magazines also. Bear in mind, large publishers no doubt have a bulk deal in place with Alamy as well as the other places.

Not very bothered about being removed, I never sold anything submitted as Live News (my local papers don't pay for pics) and anything less local would take me well over an hour before I could upload. But in the unlikely chance I catch some Live News, where should I send them now?

I don't think we can work out an optimal strategy. A commonplace file might sell for a reasonable or high amount on a micro (once a buyer paid $250 on a micro for my photo of a gift bow isolated on white - I got the bow in a pack of three for £1). Or a unique subject might sell for cents on Alamy, because it's all about the discount the buyer has negotiated, not the rarity or quality of the file. If you want highest rpd, sell via a specialist agency if you can supply according to their requirements (often a minimum number of new files/subjects per month or per quarter). If you want highest total income, the specialist agency might do that for you if you fit their requirements; or it might be micro. It's very unlikely to be Alamy. If percentage of sale $$ is paramount, micros definitely aren't it. Exclusive to Alamy may fit the bill.