Rudix Posted November 3, 2018 Share Posted November 3, 2018 Hello everyone from sunny South Africa. I am new to Alamy (but not to stock photography), now the huge job starts to get photos online! Since I recently retired (early) I now finally have more time for photography. Looking forward to learning from everyone here. Cheers, Rudi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted November 5, 2018 Share Posted November 5, 2018 Hello, Rudi. The first thing I would say is keywords, keywords, keywords. They are almost more important than the image because if they are not good no one will find your pic. Animals should be specific. What kind of rhino? You should include the Latin name and the place where they are. People will search for a specific park. Your tree should also have its scientific name. Take a look at images that appear high in searches for your subject. Check out the keywords. Anyway, I hope you enjoy yourself here. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rudix Posted November 5, 2018 Author Share Posted November 5, 2018 Hi Paulette. Thanks for the reply and the information, I need to learn a lot about keywords and how Alamy works in general. I will make sure to update/add things like parks, latin names and any other info that might end up being used in a search. I can see that key wording will be the biggest part of the work for me, I have more than 1.5 million photos on a wide variety of subjects in my archives that I could upload but keywording will keep the volumes down. I have started feeding the system with uploads (1000 over the weekend), now I just need to keep up the pace and refine my metadata. First I am trying a wide selection to see what QC says, they might not like images that I think are great.... Thanks, having fun! Cheers, Rudi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted November 5, 2018 Share Posted November 5, 2018 QC only checks for technical quality. They won't judge the subject. One nice thing about Alamy is you get to do the selections. Start looking at the threads in the Forum about Images Found and Images Sold to get an idea what sells. Also go to your Dashboard and Alamy Measures.. All of Alamy to see what people are searching for. Good luck on the 1000 images. If one fails all fail so most of us do much smaller batches. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rudix Posted November 5, 2018 Author Share Posted November 5, 2018 Thanks Paulette. Yes, I think it is great that we can choose subject matter here. What does worry me is what I have seen with other agencies, like a night time shot that has a lot of dark areas, like it should, then they fail it with "incorrect exposure" or something like that. Will see if I can submit images like that here. I am aware of the fail one fail all policy so my 1000+ image are in many smaller batches, often just 10 or so, and often by subject. But I know I need to expect fails and fix it or live with it, hopefully not too many as I try to only submit technically good images. While I am submitting from my collection I am still taking photos (full time) so I will concentrate more on what sells here and not just what I love. Thanks for your help, happy shooting (and key wording!) Rudi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert M Estall Posted November 5, 2018 Share Posted November 5, 2018 my advice would be to concentrate on what you love and not try to outguess what might sell. You say you are a young retiree so you can do the good stuff and leave the dull stuff to those those who hope to sell by any means they see fit. I wish you luck with your huge upload but remember a fail will trash all uploads waiting QC. The more cautious uploading in batches of say 50 and waiting until that clears QC might work better for you at least until you establish a track record. How you came by 1.5 million images I can only wonder at. It took me almost 50 years building a carefully captioned and edited archive. Even with sets of "similars" I reached a total of only 75,000 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rudix Posted November 5, 2018 Author Share Posted November 5, 2018 Hi Robert. Yes, I will still shoot what I love, but with Alamy in the back of my head! I have had a few problems uploading, I noticed that on slightly larger batches I sometimes get an upload error on the last few files, the Image Manager will then simply go back to the main screen and throw all of them away. So my +-1100 that I thought I uploaded (did not realize the problem in the beginning) turned out to be 939 files. Well, the good news is that they just passed QC, all of them! I am quite surprised since I expected them to clear in batches? So now while the uploads are running, limiting them to 20 or so a batch I will start the monster task to keyword. For the uploads I think I will give FTP a try.... Unfortunately my 1.5 mil images are indexed (so I can search and find them, they are spread over many drives), but have few if any keywords, so that still needs to be done and that will take lots and lots of time. The images (what I call keepers) were collected since 2003 when I bought my first DSLR, but I am a keen photographer (some will call it fanatical) and with 3 years of pro shooting they added up over the 15 years. There are some similar images but even with harsh dropping of images there will be more than 500k, enough to keep me busy here for years. Now that I am retired and have time to travel again the pace will pick up again. Photography also works well with some of my other hobbies so there are some unusual images in the collection. Thanks for the reply! Rudi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rudix Posted November 6, 2018 Author Share Posted November 6, 2018 Today's batch of 561 passed by QC, spent most of the day keywording yesterday's batch of 937 and I am not done yet but there is progress. Thanks for the advice everyone! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rudix Posted November 9, 2018 Author Share Posted November 9, 2018 Another batch of 447 (I uploaded more but more than one lot just terminated with no error, will setup FTP this weekend) passed QC, I have also been busy preparing images so will be uploading a batch of about 1000 this weekend, did my best to make sure they will pass, these large batches are making me nervous.... So I managed just over 2000 in my first week, so far so good... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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