John J Bloomfield

cropping in a way that removes context I think is against the industry accepted definition of 'editorial use'

So was this image sold on an editorial licence - that is what I had assumed as I couldn't see Alamy QC letting it go through any other way......also not sure how a professional journalist would look at the original image and see at as anything other than 'editorial' and think cropping like that would be acceptable. You can still see the uncropped version here

Well done.

What sort of ratios do you see?

I was wondering if you guys see a correlation between views/zooms/ and sales? In relation to how many images you have uploaded?

Yeah I did try to find him/her as a forum member as I thought that would be the easiest route but couldn't find them.

I am very sure Ardal O'Hanlan is a very familiar face on TV in the UK, I've watched him for countless hours over the years, Alfie Boe not so familiar to most but I have seen in person many times. As there is no real mechanism to alert and not wanting to cause issues for anyone I'll just leave it be.

Is there a way to report to let the owner know about images tagged with the wrong description. I mention this having done a search on "Alfie Boe" this morning and being presented with 3 images that are clearly Ardal O'Hanlon but have been captioned Alfie Boe. Image 1 Image 2 Image 3

I really appreciate you making that effort on my behalf - I also now wonder why I didn't tag 'atheltics' 'Road race' 'Sport'

Thanks for the feedback guys. I thought uploading my back catalogue that wasn't very important to me on a personal level might be a way to add a bit of extra passive revenue - but key-wording turns it in to something of potentially too much effort for not enough reward. Although I doubt I'll know what reward there will be if any yet as I've only uploaded a couple of events that I cover ever year - I chose them as they are my most stolen images but they only really have any appeal in September each year. And if my local rag doesn't use Alamy they probably won't get picked up anyway I suspect as they mainly use shutterstock looking at the photo credits online, though shutterstock has no photos of this event.

I struggle to add enough keywords to get my images up to 'good visibility' I think mainly because I want to keep everything 'relevant' - I am aware there are people out there that you can pay to keyword for you and was wondering if you guys had positive experience of any service that does this?

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'd been watching some information on YouTube about a few other agencies and it seemed to be info you could get quite easily.

Is there a way to see what the best selling image in a keyword is at all? Just so we can understand 'what sells'

Hi Guys Apologies if this has been asked before I did search but couldn't find the answer. If I wanted to find out what the best selling image for a given keyword on Alamy is - is it is as simple as doing a search and sorting by relevant will that put the best selling image at the top of the list?

I'm pretty new here and haven't yet had any sales but I did a great deal of forum reading before deciding to use Alamy for my back catalogue which I am working through to upload, I also have a bit of background in web SEO - given my short time here I wont be offended if my opinion is disregarded but here goes. Quantity and Diversity - your image standard is high but the quantity and diversity is low - it seems this site is very much a numbers game. Tagging - I think the 'discoverability' thing is misleading and probably leads to actually damaging your search results if you end up tagging for the sake of it - every search engine I have ever worked with that uses tagging penalises listings that use vague or irrelevant tag - for example you tag Ambassador a lot - a user here searching using this term is not looking for images like yours - your tag should be about the content of the image only and not about the photographer. Tags should also be in English, that is how searchers are encouraged to use the site. Things like animals though, I would tage with, common name, latin name, and any nicknames etc. In short Tag about the content only, tag in english. Processing images for Alamy can be time consuming with captions and tags and can slow you down a lot in getting your images online, I would strongly suggest the following - do your captions and tags in your DAM (Digital Asset manager) and make sure they are copied to the IPTC fields that Alamy reads - then upload by FTP - if you do a good enough job then they will go straight on sale when they pass QC and you can refine them later in Alamy image manager if you wish. So for my workflow I will take a set of images with common values - taken in the same location or same event etc and then in my DAM (ACDsee) I will select the them all and then on mass apply tags that apply to them all and usually a generic and relevant caption that is accurate for all but not highly specific. I will then select the images in smaller groups applying keywords on mass that are relevant to all the images in that group, and so on getting smaller and smaller groups. If I am short of time I'll just FTP them all to Alamy at this point and then complete the final bit in Alamy image manager after they've passed QC, but I find it faster in my DAM - I Then flick through the images one by one adding a bit of extra image specific detail to the caption if appropriate and any tags that apply only to that image then send them up by ftp. Once they pass QC in Alamy I then add all the optional stuff like category from my laptop whenever I have 10 minutes. as they say 'finished is better that perfect' - but in alamy context perhaps 'on sale is better that perfect' - you can always fine tune as you go.