AIM update notes - **Updated Jan 2019**

[Sultanpepa]

1 hour ago, Alamy said:

 

We've logged into your account through the public alamy.com site (not our internal one) and can see it there.

 

Please send contributors@alamy.com a screengrab of what you're seeing along with browser details etc so we can investigate further.

 

Thanks

 

James A

 

E-mail sent James

[Allan Bell]

The "Non Exclusive" attribute has already been very useful to me with just over 4,100 images on Alamy.

 

Clicking on the "Exclusive" button earlier I saw I was 2 images short of of my total passed images. Did not fancy searching through all my images for the 2 rogue images so I waited for the new "Non Exclusive button" and when I clicked that button the rogue images popped up.

 

"Only on Alamy" button clicked on both images and job done.

 

Saved a lot of time and now I can truthfully say, "All my images are exclusive to Alamy."

 

Thanks James.

 

Allan

 

 

[wiskerke]

2 hours ago, Alamy said:

 

We've logged into your account through the public alamy.com site (not our internal one) and can see it there.

 

Please send contributors@alamy.com a screengrab of what you're seeing along with browser details etc so we can investigate further.

 

Thanks

 

James A

 

I am in the same boat: No new button in Firefox & PC.

But it's there in IE and Chrome & PC.

 

wim

[lophius]

I was wondering also if there is a way for searching in AIM by the submission name.

Cheers.

[tarsierspectral]

duplicate

[tarsierspectral]

delete

[tarsierspectral]

delete please

[Sultanpepa]

On 01/02/2019 at 12:32, wiskerke said:

 

I am in the same boat: No new button in Firefox & PC.

But it's there in IE and Chrome & PC.

 

wim

 

Having cleared cache I now have it with chrome.

[Harry Harrison]

On 1/31/2019 at 14:26, Alamy said:

We're working on that...

 

Apologies, I've only just seen that you replied to my suggestion, that's great news. I can see that it is by no means straightforward though!

 

One thing I've just encountered is the ability of Excel to mangle foreign accents if you simply open the csv directly. Not Excel's fault exactly because it offers a way to import the csv and define the column as text, but nevertheless if you don't notice it it comes as a shock. Libre Office seems to deal with it better, forcing you to at least inspect the columns before you open it.

[Harry Harrison]

21 hours ago, lophius said:

I was wondering also if there is a way for searching in AIM by the submission name.

 

Yes, me too. It seems not though. The brilliant new data download has enabled us to easily see images where tags or supertags or some other parameter need attention and this may often be for all images in that particular batch. At the moment you can easily find one image in AIM of course but the batch name or upload date is not displayed for that image, it would great to have some route to the batch from any given image, or to have the batch name in the spreadsheet as has already been suggested.

[Sally]

13 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

 

Yes, me too. It seems not though. The brilliant new data download has enabled us to easily see images where tags or supertags or some other parameter need attention and this may often be for all images in that particular batch. At the moment you can easily find one image in AIM of course but the batch name or upload date is not displayed for that image, it would great to have some route to the batch from any given image, or to have the batch name in the spreadsheet as has already been suggested.

Of course, you can also do all this using the Alamy Lightroom plugin. It creates smart collections such as all images missing tags, supertags, and other optional information. Individual image Alamy references and submission numbers are also shown.

[Harry Harrison]

19 minutes ago, Sally said:

Of course, you can also do all this using the Alamy Lightroom plugin. It creates smart collections such as all images missing tags, supertags, and other optional information. Individual image Alamy references and submission numbers are also shown.

 

Yes, thanks, I've read with interest you're information on this but I haven't taken the plunge yet, presumably it also takes good care of foreign characters on import & export?

 

This request for a batch name export, or link to a batch from an image in AIM is slightly different as on the face of it I would think it was very easy to implement and it would mean that anyone could easily attend to their tags etc. without having access to their Lightroom machine.

 

The new easily available Alamy data export has moved the goalposts in that it does open up the possibility of introducing an import/update within AIM so it's good to know that they are at least thinking about it.

[Harry Harrison]

31 minutes ago, Sally said:

Of course, you can also do all this using the Alamy Lightroom plugin

 

Perhaps I should also say that if I am at my Lightroom machine then I can find out which batch an image was in because I save them to collections corresponding to each batch, but not everyone uses Lightroom, and not everyone would necessarily do that even if they did.

[Sally]

1 hour ago, Harry Harrison said:

 

Perhaps I should also say that if I am at my Lightroom machine then I can find out which batch an image was in because I save them to collections corresponding to each batch, but not everyone uses Lightroom, and not everyone would necessarily do that even if they did.

 

All true. Just for clarity, if you use the plugin to upload to Alamy, it automatically creates submission collections.

[Harry Harrison]

1 hour ago, Sally said:

 

All true. Just for clarity, if you use the plugin to upload to Alamy, it automatically creates submission collections.

 

Thanks, I'm straying from this thread but the reason I was a bit shy of using the plugin is that I have duplicate filenames from where both my cameras have gone round the clock at least once (only 9,999). Lightroom doesn't treat them  as duplicate images when you import because it must take another parameter into account (date/time?) but I think the plugin Help file suggests that you rename them. Easy to do but I don't particularly want to. Maybe I misunderstood as once Lightroom 'knows' the Alamy ID then that would be unique. An Alamy import could certainly use the Alamy ID as the key.

[Richard Baker]

I'm trying to plough through thousands to make them exclusive, using the new Non-exclusive filter tab. What I'm experiencing is the duplication of Alamy-referenced files in each upload.

 

So, ticking each upload's Select All Passed I scroll down the list to the next upload batch (nowhere near 500) but find there are 6-8 that haven't been highlighted so they're not going to be changed. Those that haven't been highlighted have exactly the same Alamy reference numbers. Worse than that, I cannot control-click them to alter them as a batch (and I won't know if their similars have been changed or not) so I have to select each one individually!

 

Please tell me this is a glitch!

 

Richard.

[Alamy]

26 minutes ago, Richard Baker said:

I'm trying to plough through thousands to make them exclusive, using the new Non-exclusive filter tab. What I'm experiencing is the duplication of Alamy-referenced files in each upload.

 

So, ticking each upload's Select All Passed I scroll down the list to the next upload batch (nowhere near 500) but find there are 6-8 that haven't been highlighted so they're not going to be changed. Those that haven't been highlighted have exactly the same Alamy reference numbers. Worse than that, I cannot control-click them to alter them as a batch (and I won't know if their similars have been changed or not) so I have to select each one individually!

 

Please tell me this is a glitch!

 

Richard.

 

Hi Richard - hard to gauge what the exact problem is from your description, but two options:

 

- Send an email to contributors@alamy.com with the details and the team can look into this

- If all your images are to be marked as exclusive, confirm via email and refer to the issues you're having and we should be able to set them all behind the scenes

 

Thanks

 

James A

[Alamy]

4 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

 

Thanks, I'm straying from this thread..

 

If you could keep to the thread topic that would be appreciated. Discussion of the (unofficial) lightroom plugin can go into it's own thread though!

 

Thanks

 

James A

[Harry Harrison]

1 hour ago, Alamy said:

If you could keep to the thread topic that would be appreciated

 

Understood

[Marianne]

Wow, lots of nice upgrades. I'm glad I waited for the cut and paste option and that delete all will be a big help for my older keyword-intensive images. Thanks! 

Getting a CSV file with all that data will also be very helpful. 

[Richard Baker]

16 hours ago, Alamy said:

 

Hi Richard - hard to gauge what the exact problem is from your description, but two options:

 

- Send an email to contributors@alamy.com with the details and the team can look into this

- If all your images are to be marked as exclusive, confirm via email and refer to the issues you're having and we should be able to set them all behind the scenes

 

Thanks

 

James A

 

I've managed to do it, thanks James. The phenomena of rogue duplicates hasn't occurred again. Bizarre.

[Harry Harrison]

I've noticed that where I have a phrase as a tag then the csv export can comma separate the phrase. As far as I can see this is where the phrase is 4 or more words, 3 or less seems to be OK. 

 

e.g. R7J458 where "Saint Mary the Virgin" comes down in the csv as "Saint, Mary, the, Virgin"

 

Similarly PBX86K where "Chapelle de Notre Dame de Grace" comes down as "Chapelle,de,Notre,Dame,de,Grace"

 

On the site they look fine, you are allowed 4 or more words in a tag aren't you?

[Alamy]

On 2/5/2019 at 11:37, Harry Harrison said:

I've noticed that where I have a phrase as a tag then the csv export can comma separate the phrase. As far as I can see this is where the phrase is 4 or more words, 3 or less seems to be OK. 

 

e.g. R7J458 where "Saint Mary the Virgin" comes down in the csv as "Saint, Mary, the, Virgin"

 

Similarly PBX86K where "Chapelle de Notre Dame de Grace" comes down as "Chapelle,de,Notre,Dame,de,Grace"

 

On the site they look fine, you are allowed 4 or more words in a tag aren't you?

 

Thanks for the feedback - we'll look into this.

 

Alamy

[Alamy]

Another little update for you today:

 

> You no longer have to select an image (or images) in order to be able to request a metadata CSV report from AIM.

 

Cheers

 

Alamy

[Graham]

Since the "Location" filed in the AIM Optional tab no longer works (and has never been searchable as far as I know), or at least is not connected to a map or auto-complete following the change to Google maps, can its link to Discoverability be disabled? 

 

An image does not show as fully "Optimized" unless something is entered into this field.  This now seems to be an exercise in futility, and it would be good if the link between Location content and Discoverability could be deleted so that the Location field can just be left empty without impacting on Discoverability.  I am not even sure why it is being retained at all if it does not work, is not searchable and appears no longer to do nothing useful.

 

I like to check that my images are Optimized as far as possible.  If they show as not fully Optimized, there should be a good reason and incentive to change it (e.g. remembering to put in the full quota of supertags), not just putting something (anything!) in a field that no longer has any relevance to anything.

 

Graham