Search the Community

I've been selling photos through Alamy for a number of years without any issues, but lately I am having problems with them sharing my photos with a third party distributor. I had signed up to this, being tempted by the sales pitch that it was another 'lucrative" avenue. I soon discovered that any sales where watered down to the point where the amount I received was both not worth it and deeply insulting. It was especially livid to discover that the third party was taking a much larger percentage. I promptly complained and opted out last April, settling for the simple arrangement of a 50/50 spilt with Alamy by giving them exclusivity. So... I was gobsmacked to learn that earlier this month (July) one of my pictures was again sold through a third party who took 40%, leaving me with 30%. I have written again to Alamy, demanding an explanation and demanding that this stops NOW! Have any other photographers out there had this problem? Can you advise me what legal avenues I can take if they continue to fail to honour the agreement? And can anyone recommend another photo agency? PS I am already braced for the usual Covid-19 excuses, as though no-one else has to deal with the situation.

Hello everyone, I'm a very old contributor, but this is my first time on the forum. I'm having a serious problem and although this is going ahead for already several years time, I finally decided to ask help here on the forum. To be honest, on last year I tried to explain this issue to the Alamy support, but they couldn't help me, so I hope to find some useful feedback here. As the most of you, I have my images on sale also on several other stock agencies. One of these agencies around five years ago put my whole portfolio on sale here on Alamy, without asking my permission. But much worse than this is the fact that this agency never paid me a single cent for all the sales they made with my images. When I discussed about this with them in the past, they pretended they didn't have any sales at all, but this is absolutely impossible, because the same images are also sold by myself here and I have several sales every given month for many years. Obviously after I realized about it, I immediately asked to let me cancel my subscription as contributor to them, but they refused to do it.. can you believe it? As they are a stock agency, even if not one of the big ones, but very often my images in the search engine here on Alamy, come first under this agency name, rather than under my own portfolio.., so this means that I'm loosing lots of money that this agency is getting in my place, without even share with me my part. It's a real fraudulent action. I'm totally sure that over five years, they stolen several thousands of dollars from me. I'm not saying the name of this agency, because I'm not sure that this is allowed, but I would need to know from you, what would you do in my place. Doing a legal action against this agency, would be very expensive, because I'm located in Italy, this agency is located in Spain and Alamy in the UK, this is why I've never done it, but I'm hoping that a sort of organization that protect artists/photographers from these kind of issues might exist... Any advise, suggestion, or useful comment will be much appreciated. Thank you very much.