chilker

I'm 29, and uploaded my test photos first a few years ago, and then didn't upload anything again until earlier this year. Still haven't had any success, but I'm having fun taking photos, uploading photos (mostly still catching up on ones I took in the last 4 years, before I was really interested in making stock photos), researching, and tagging. I don't post much, but I do enjoy reading the forum whether just for fun conversations like this one, or for tips and advice in other parts of the forum. Great community. Now I've just got to figure out how to sell my pictures. 🙂

Thanks! I will be more cautious about shadows! I guess I never realized that dark shadows were considered problematic.

Thanks for taking a look! The concert ones are the dark ones? Or am I consistently too dark? With future uploads I'll keep trying to brighten them and not let the shadows be too overbearingly dark. Thank you! I agree about the concert images--unfortunately I took those shots years ago before I even thought I would be putting them online. I know they're not great, but I saw there were very few photos of that band on Alamy, so I thought I'd at least try with a few. Thank you for the feedback!

Hello! I've had an account here for quite some time, but only in the last few months have I actually started uploading beyond my initial test upload. I have been working through quite a backlog of photos I've taken over the last few years and now have a few hundred up and available. I recognize that Alamy sales tend to take a little more time than a new submitter might hope, but before I commit to adding hundreds more photos and spending the time describing and tagging them, I'd like some advice or feedback about how I've been doing so far. Could someone please take a look and offer some thoughts? I live in Japan, so most of my shots were taken here. It seems Alamy does not have tons of photos of Japan, but I don't know if that's because photos of Japan don't often sell here, or if it's the other way around. Anyway, I greatly appreciate your time and look forward to hearing from you!

Great! Thank you so much.

Spacecadet and Phil, thank you very much for the feedback and caution about mis-captioned wildlife. I appreciate it. I'm still fairly new here, so I appreciate advice from veterans. Tt looks like I've had an account for a long time, but I only had my original 3-picture test upload until 2 months ago. I'm trying to do this right and thank you for your help! Bhandol, thank you! That indeed looks like it! Were you already familiar with the bird, or did you find it somewhere? I see now that it is on Wikipedia's list of Birds of Cambodia, but I guess I missed it. Do you have another reference source that you use? I also think it's interesting that it was previously classed as a member of the thrush family Turdidae, but now it's not. So a lot of you were close in stating it was probably a thrush. Thank you all for the help. What a wonderful forum of helpful people.

Thanks everyone for the input. I've tried searching Wikipedia's list of birds in Cambodia, and many other such lists online, but as they don't always show both sexes or adolescents, it's hard to get an exact ID on this bird. I appreciate the help, and will update the information using our best guess (while making it clear that it's not 100% confirmed). Is that the best practice?

I'm wondering if there are any ornithologists out there who might know the name of this bird. I took this photo of it inside the Royal Palace grounds in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and haven't had luck figuring out what kind of bird it is. I'm not too knowledgeable about birds, so I'm not even sure of what family of birds it might be a member of. If anyone has an idea, I would much appreciate the help. Thank you!

Good to know all of this! Thanks for the helpful information about search and what characters are ignored.

Thanks for that! Good to know about the trouble with diacritic marks. I have added Japanese language tags to a few items just to see if they work, and they seem to be ok. (You can search "ニホンザル" (Japanese for "Japanese macaque") and my pictures show up. So I think it functions. I just don't know how useful it'll be or how it'll be dealt with if or when the images are sent to international distributors. Thanks everyone for the thoughts!

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!