chilker

Thanks for the response! I'm glad to know the system is working. I'm just trying to understand more about how it works and the best way to make sure that my pictures are properly tagged in Japanese (since I expect many of the potential customers for my images will be Japanese).

I'm still quite new here and hope this is the right section in the forum to ask this. I have read somewhere that we should not generally put tags in foreign languages on our images. However, as many of my images were taken in Japan and I have some ability to speak and write the language, I'm curious if it's worth adding Japanese tags. I thought it might help when I still have room to add tags to images taken in Japan of distinctly Japanese things (cherry blossom viewing, certain temples and shrines, cultural festivals, etc). Some locations and festivals have unexpected kanji/characters in their names, and using machine translation when putting the photos (and accompanying tags) into Japanese distributors' databases would result in incorrect translations and inadequate or completely false tagging. Does anyone know how do distribution services work? I looked through this page (https://www.alamy.com/contactus/local-distributors.asp) and found some of the Japanese image distributors and looked through their databases and didn't find any of my own photos of Japanese scenes in there. Do they only pick and choose a few images from Alamy and redistribute those? Or are they supposed to be offering all of Alamy's photos with machine-translated tags? I'm just curious how it all works and if it's worth adding Japanese tags. I appreciate any insight you can offer. Thanks!

Thanks! That makes a lot of sense, too!

Thanks! I wonder... I think the images I've put up in those categories had people without releases, so they would be editorial only... but why would a potential customer be looking for photos with limited use?

I'm sort of new.... I am an American based in Japan. I actually created an account and did an initial upload about 3 years ago, but other aspects of life took priority and I didn't upload any more at that time. I finally decided to get a little more serious about it a short while ago, and I've been uploading a lot more regularly in recent weeks. My images have been getting viewed, and while I looking at the reports, I saw the tag [LU] on a few of the items. I'm curious what that means. For example: Yoyogi park, Harajuku [LU] Tsukiji Fish market [RF] [LU] I know what RF means, because I see the keyword list on the right. RM - Rights Managed RF - Royalty-Free PR - Property Released MR - Model Released Land - Landscape Pt - Portrait Pan - Panoramic Sq - Square C - Creative WP - With People WOP - Without People DT - Date Taken AE - Archive Excluded FS - File Size PH - Photograph IL - Illustration CO - Cut Outs But what is LU? I look forward to being a more active participant in the Alamy community, and look forward to hearing from you!