meanderingemu

1 hour ago, Cal said:

 

 

 

In regards to selections, I had a quick look at the live news feed today and had to do virtually no scrolling to find a picture of a cat being petted and birds going about their business. That isn't news and is an obvious abuse of the platform, possibly to shoehorn in bad quality photos. There doesn't appear to be a great lot of moderation going on at the LN platform.

just wait until that Cat gets reported as a sale in two days 😉.  this was my experience a few months ago complaining about some content, and image did actually sell so i've stopped questioning- but i agree.  What i find worse, is that most of these are coming from agencies.....  the one that got me in the feed was the Grey Heron: 22 images, none with any "story" (i've done a couple birds that were weather-seasonal based) and most extremely marginal-  By contrast the 2 house sparrows image fighting at feeders are clean, have a story and "newsable" in that niche 

35 minutes ago, M.Chapman said:

Alamy QC currently only focuses on image quality, but the quality of captioning and tagging is ignored. Why is this? Bad tagging and captioning wastes customers' time. There are masses of incorrectly keyworded imaes on Alamy. Could initial QC include a check of keywording and captioning as well as image quality? After that there could be a "report" button added to allow contributors and customers to flag instances of incorrect keywording. I'm not suggesting every breach is investigated, but I imagine that patterns would soon emerge revealing large "clusters" of images that have been "auto-keyworded" and action could then be targeted.

 

Mark

Again i don't disagree that this is not a problem, but i still think Alamy is sending the wrong message by not penalising these people through the Algorithm.  There does not seem to be any penalty for those who don't play Alamy's way.   

The other one i have found that is problematic, is people using the "Reportage" way to upload images straight through, and gain 450 characters of description and not have any QC, for images that have nothing to do with the spirit of Reportage, and are clearly not Archive. 

1 minute ago, M.Chapman said:

 

Apart from overloading the database, and slowing down search results.... Potentially reducing sales whilst driving up server costs resulting in lower profits and further reduction in our commsion rates.

 

Duplicates could be culled automatically - that would make a good start.

 

Mark

as i want people who load duplicates to get penalised, by having their ratings dropped, i find the idea troubling (provided the time is not an issue, Have customers complained about that, OP said they complained about bad images).  You don't play by the rules, suffer the consequences.

This to me removes the attraction of Alamy of if you work WITH us, we will reward you..

5 hours ago, with_infinite_degrees_of_freedom said:

I created my Alamy profile a few days ago and passed the QC with the first set of 3 images. I then added the tags, super tags and optional content along with caption, all three images turned green "on sale". I gave it 2-3 days after adding all the metadata and then made searches on the platform to see if my pictures are appearing in the search. Even with super tags that are also a part of my caption, I do not see any of my 3 pictures appearing on search. 

 

A glitch: When I download the data from AIM, I see all the tags and supertags in the csv, but the status for all three images is "Not On Sale". On my Contributor dashboard I see that it says "3 images with good or optimized discoverability are on sale". 

 

I don't really know whether my images are on sale or not. The images not showing up on the search and inconsistent metadata information is not helping me understand what's going on. 

 

Could you kind people, please suggest what else can I check to understand what's going wrong - do I need to wait for a few more days so the images are re-indexed or is this a case of genuine bad keywording? 

 

Thanks a lot in advance. 

don't worry, there is currently a delay in the uploading to the For Sale side, after some update over the week-end.  Currently only imaged approved up to December 3rd. GMT have gone through.  Hopefully yours come in next batch, which usually happens early morning, GMT again,

The standard is usually overnight after approval, hopefully this is back to normal soon.

1 hour ago, Ollie said:

Cull the Collection:  The collection needs to be reduced in size.  Alamy seems proud of its collection size.  The result is that many searches simply overwhelm the potential buyer with the hundreds or thousands, or tens of thousands, or—really—hundreds of thousands of images that will be found by a keyword search. There are many bad images in the collection, many similars, and many duplicates.  These are dross that get in the way of the buyer’s attempt to find an image that will suit his needs. 

 

If these are being offered to Clients, isn't it more proof that the Algorithm is not working, and this is where time needs to be dedicated.  What you are describing would lead to bad rating and images falling off the planet of searches.  These images being in the database or not would then have zero impact to the clients.

The question is Why are clients being presented these?   

8 hours ago, Liam Bunce said:

Are you getting this message on Alamy Measures? (Your account has not collected any activity for customers measured by the tool within the date selected) I've tried different dates but still the same no information.

 

even odder is that i just noticed my Number of Zoom is actually up , so part of the process did actually run but the data was loss after

3 hours ago, MizBrown said:

The saying in IT is that everything takes longer than estimated.   Getting the chief engineer on the phone will not make things go faster.   When I call to report an outage on my home internet connection and get a busy signal, I don't call further since the problem has been reported and reported.

 

while this might be generally right, I have rarely seen IT scheduled stuff affect things Before the process.  While I understand the schedule maintenance on Saturday went longer, and had bigger impact, I still don't understand how it affected Friday's image for sale upload which is being claimed. 

41 minutes ago, PAL Media said:

Measures shows no data even though it shows today's date

Database update is behind where it should be

i see your Live News from the 1st, which would have traditionally gone to stock on Friday, as of this morning.  So it does seem to be still behind.

So i went through the portfolio of many of the regular Live News UK contributors, and I did not find one image from the 2nd of December of after available for stock.

Elizabeth @Alamy, it does not seem as it is business as usual.  There seems to be at least a three day lag in the process if this helps your IT team. 

and we had a lead change overnight.... It's a tight race....  Who will be the winner is still up for grabs.... stay tuned....

(indirect bump to the top)

42 minutes ago, Alamy said:

 

I can confirm this is not the new standard and it's all related to work being carried out behind the scenes to improve our platform. We're sorry for any delays you have encountered over the last few days and are thanking you all for your patience.

 

All the best,

Elisabeth 

thanks, just that it does affect workflow, i'm starting to think i need to upload a couple frames through stock at same time LN to reduce the gaps, as this is not the first time in last few months (though i think it was the longest).

So the maintenance work started on overnight Thursday to Friday? Would there be anyway to give us some heads up on this?  I track the Twitter account, and didn't see any warning that this was going to me a major all week-end undertaking.  

Again thanks for the feed-back

@Alamy  Thanks Elisabeth.  Cam you confirm if 4 days is now standard for image t go from accepted to On Sale, as this does not seem to be related to maintenance. 

same, but they still appear in "Download sales report" (which is where i usually go first)

and someone takes the lead

Quote

 

10 minutes ago, geoff s said:

Betty, it was your use of the phrase "fairy dust" when discussing this lens a few years ago that made me want one !

I was a bit concerned about the noise because I've just had to return a s/h one for a refund as it arrived having fairly serious damage.

The concensus is, as you say, that the noise is standard.

I've taken it out once and it's already produced some of the most pleasing images I've had for a while. Fairy dust ! 

 

 

need to stop reading this thread, need to stop reading this thread, need to stop reading this thread.....

41 minutes ago, MizBrown said:

 

They may not have logged out from earlier sessions. 

there seem to be a movement of One person in at some point, so i wondered if it could only take One user maximum, and then late today, two.

I never log out, btw, but was not allowed in.

10 minutes ago, sb photos said:

Just back in after cleaning my car, it was pretty grubby. Good to see the forum up and running again and my Dashboard accessible and FileZilla sees my upload folders at last. I wonder how much business was lost by contributors and Alamy. What was annoying was earlier social media posts that the 'planned maintenance' was complete, then a lack of realistic updates (try again in a few minutes). 

you would think if it was "planned" they could have given the contributors a head's up.

1 hour ago, MizBrown said:

 

That usually takes 12 to 24 hours when everything is working fine. 

they didn't get one Friday, so up to 72 hours now.

1 hour ago, losdemas said:

OK, to add to my previous post.  Probably the singular most important thing is that both clients and contributors have confidence in the Alamy platform. Please invest a little in ensuring that the forum, the contributors dashboard and - most important of all - the customer facing front-end website remain active and available 24/7/365. If the front end is down, then a customer is likely to have less confidence in the platform as a whole -  regardless of the reason or how wrong this might be.

 

Another point - that has been raised (and dashed) many times before - is to please re-consider your previous decisions to make the whole forum public. At least give us one area of the forum where - although it may not be entirely private - is at least not available to search engines and only to registered users, where we may discuss fees etc. without potential embarrassment or fear of lowering license fees or worsening terms even further.

 

Thank you.

in line with this, and i understand issues will arise, what are your project for Information to Contributors.  We have had some major issues over the last few days, Images approved or transferred to Stock on Thursday are still not up for sale as off 10pm Sunday GMT, yet we have had Zero information from Alamy what is happening.  There was a tweet about "Maintenance issues" but since the new tweet states all is normal, the problem is obviously not a maintenance issue.   Many times it has been reported on these forums that we are seeing more and longer delays on images being made available to clients, AFTER approval- but we have had no acknowledgement what the issue is, and what is being made to address it.

33 minutes ago, Mr Standfast said:

 

 

I respectfully disagree!

lol....  my issue is i'm not sure my nomadic days are over yet, so the 100-400 was extravagant weight wise....   but totally worth it mentally....  

(of course didn't stop me from getting one of the Viltrox fast prime on sale this week... 😁 )

5 hours ago, Hanna_Fate said:

Sometimes people asking for help are just hoping they need to change a setting or something.  They don't really want to WORK at it.

 

This is something I have noticed particularly about photography.  Beginners think it's "easy" because you get recognizable pictures right away. (unlike drawing, where you have to hone your eye-hand coordination before you can call anything "realistic")  What they don't realize is that it takes a lot of work to learn how to make really GOOD photos. 

 

Some of these people only barely know which way to point the camera.  Subtleties such as depth of field escape them.

 

My advice to anyone who is finding that their photos don't sell is:  Study photography.  Learn wherever you can.  Even very old books about film photography will be useful to you, because light hasn't changed with the advent of digital cameras. 

 

An expensive camera won't magically make your photos better.  A good camera will make it less work to create good images, but you still have to know how to use it.

 

 

and then the second part, is they assume once they have figured that part out, the images will sell for themselves, not realising they are competing against 1000s of other distributors, and if they are not willing to make the marketing part of it, having nice images is not going to help. in stock.

You need

-Subjects people need and want, and

-Make sure people see them

you need to market your image, above others.... 

52 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

Yeah, mine is noisy. Ignore it. I don’t even notice it anymore. You’re going to like this lens. I see you do travel/landscapes, but this lens also is special with people. I like the separation I get with it.

This image was taken some distance away from the people. The closer I would have gotten, the more oof the background would have been. I’ve always felt this lens has fairy dust, along with the 56 1.2.

 

nice,

repeat to yourself: i do not need a new lens, i do not need a new lens, i do not need a new lens

one of my biggest pandemic problem, is as i am no longer moving every few weeks, i've allowed my gear to expand....  

i bought myself the 100-400 about a month ago and same thing, never really found conclusive explanation except it is what it is, a.  I actually just had to go a check again, because i've actually stopped hearing it because it became normal in my mind after a while... 

22 minutes ago, Avpics said:

Is improving the speed and reliability of the 'daily' database update being targeted? Not having images on sale for days on end is frustrating, in particular of topical subjects and Live News that fall into a black hole.

 

 

+1.  Another lost day today.

21 minutes ago, RyanU said:

It would be interesting to hear your prospects on UK newspaper sales given the system will soon become mandatory for all contributors. Do you expect sales to generally improve across the board, given a broader access to content for certain news publishers, and therefore more likelihood of overall usage of Alamy over competitors?
 

Also, will rates for Live News be affected negatively by the reluctance of news publishers to pay substantially due to Covid-related financial issues?

also strategy with the US office and input on potential in other markets,

in addressing "how to get the best out of contributing"  it would be interesting if you could address the current ranking assessment system for contributors and images as it seems their is some issues, as seen in this recent thread