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Hi all, Hope you had a decent and healthy start to the new year - and 2021 will be huge improvement over the one just gone! I have been with Alamy since around 15 years, and despite a constant fall in commission, have so far stayed with them. In the last ten years on teh 1300 images I have up here, I made a average sale of just under 5 a year. Obviously nothing to make a living of. Most of my images are from China and editiorial. I have been a live news contributor. After working on the picture desk of the Asia hub of one for the four major news wires I have changed the way I keyword, following some of the methology on the picture desk. But the agency and Alamy are of course not using the same search algorithms (or clients). At the end of last year, I decided to do more in the way of Sale Optimisation. So over 65% of all my images now have a meaningful caption (which includes the key 5 W's), and I completed the Optional Info for those as well and completed 50 keywords, with 10 supertags. (not sure if anyone of us can see the keywords...) My QC rating is 2 solid dark stars, one light (whatever that means..out of 5?). It may be low due to having a past of uploading via FTP from location and on a few occasions having to re-upload due to some errors. The CTR for the last month is: "Total CTR for O. Geibel: 0.96" (fo the last 12 months). Archive of images here I plan to: 1. upload more editorial archive pictures of pollution and industrial production of China (another 1000 pictures this year) 2. optimize the remaining 35% 3. opt out of the "personal use including single copy, non-retail wall art prints" ( ...I may not really understand how to use this, or where the money is made here) Any critique and thoughts most welcome.

...but sadly, only 1 from my portfolio. My CTR has been reasonable the last few months, but is in freefall this month (July), so when I noticed some nice person had 'zoomed' one of my images, I looked at my Pseudo info and saw that someone had searched for 'Russia historical portrait', and zoomed 3404 of the 4003 images they viewed. Occasionally, I have seen up to perhaps about 50 zooms for a single search phrase, but never anything remotely near the 3404 in this instance. Unless this was a bot stealing our images for display on some dodgy website (unlikely? given that only Alamy customers' zooms are recorded??) just curious as to why someone would have the time and inclination to zoom so may images?

I recall a forum thread a while back in which (besides carrying on the eternal debate about the pros and cons of RM and RF), it was said that Alamy prefers RF because this is increasingly what clients want. This has stayed at the back of my mind, and I thought it should be possible to test how true this is by counting the number of searches in Alamy Measures that specify RM and RF. AM appears not to provide any information other than the search terms on all-of-Alamy searches, so I went to my own most important pseudonym and looked up searches from 1st January to 30th June this year. I stopped counting after 100 pages of search results. Here are the results: Searches that specify RM or RF RM: 25 searches RF: 14 searches Distribution of RM and RF in pseudonym RM: 95% RF: 5%. The results should be treated with a lot of caution. First of all, number of searches that specify RM or RF is very small and more data might change the picture. Secondly, most of the images under this pseudonym are RM and this probably skews the results. I used only one pseudonym because my pseudonyms aren't subject-exclusive so a lot of searches show up in more than one. Thirdly, results are also likely to vary by subject matter. But if more forum members were willing to chip in with their own figures, we might build up a more general picture.