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What's wrong with my portfolio ?


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Immediate thoughts:

 

1. You have a very small portfolio.. simply upload more.

2. Some of your pictures are very commercial and Alamy as an agency does better with Editorial images.. I like your pictures very much though and Alamy do sell commercial imagery too so leave it there and hopefully someone else will see and like them!

3. Captions and keywords need to be in English.. a few of yours (e.g. RB2MGE ) aren't.

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10 minutes ago, IgorK48 said:

Please help me, what's wrong with my portfolio?

On Alamy month, only 37 views, not one zoom, and not one sale.

What am I doing wrong?

https://www.alamy.com/search/imageresults.aspx?pl=1&plno=657932

I think you are looking for big results too quickly with small numbers.  It takes time and large numbers to make a regular income here.  When I started my initial targets were 6 months and/or 800 photos in my port before expecting my first sale.  I did actually beat those but I think they are reasonable.

You do also have some duplicates in your port - I do in mine I would suspect it is something that comes with starting in stock.

So maybe look to wait six months and get 800 -100 wide-ranging  images in your port before worrying about sales - they will come just not that fast

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I had about 900 images on Alamy before my first sale and that was back in 2011 when sales came a bit easier. About two years of uploading and keywording (tagging) before a result.

 

Quantity is required but NOT at the price of quality and NOT too many similars.

 

Starsphinx did well to achieve a sale with so few images in 2018 considering there are many more images on Alamy database than in 2011.

 

Allan

 

Just had a look at your portfolio, after my above comments, and despite the fact that others are constructively criticising your images, which can be a bit disheartening, I would like to complement you on having some good, very good, and even one or two excellent images in your port.

 

ITMA

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Hi IgorK48

 

agree with above comments - also:

 

1. A number of your images eg. RBEY46, RB1GY6 and RA6XNB look s a little underexposed and also flat/low contrast. Try using the curves tool in PS to improve them 

 

2. Alamy is mainly editorial-biased -- you have to ask yourself "What is someone going to use this image for?". If you cant answer that immediately you take the image, it probably wont sell here - I am thinking of for example, images RA6Y38, RA6YK6 and RB9XG8. Backgrounds dont tend to sell well on Alamy in my experience

 

Hope that helps

 

Kumar

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1 hour ago, Allan Bell said:

I had about 900 images on Alamy before my first sale and that was back in 2011 when sales came a bit easier. About two years of uploading and keywording (tagging) before a result.

 

Quantity is required but NOT at the price of quality and NOT too many similars.

 

Starsphinx did well to achieve a sale with so few images in 2018 considering there are many more images on Alamy database than in 2011.

 

Allan

 

Just had a look at your portfolio, after my above comments, and despite the fact that others are constructively criticising your images, which can be a bit disheartening, I would like to complement you on having some good, very good, and even one or two excellent images in your port.

 

ITMA

Thank you Allan.
Its a learning curve - I have to work out why the ones that sold did - and then hopefully repeat.  I consider this a work of years not months

 

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Many thanks to everyone for your opinions, tips and criticism. Now I understand in which direction to move on. There is another question that I can not understand, there is a landscape, there are no people or property, so I can license both RM and RF, but how better not to scare off the buyer and get more profit?

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2 minutes ago, IgorK48 said:

Many thanks to everyone for your opinions, tips and criticism. Now I understand in which direction to move on. There is another question that I can not understand, there is a landscape, there are no people or property, so I can license both RM and RF, but how better not to scare off the buyer and get more profit?

Alamy recommends RF, but contra-intuitively, peer reports here don't seem to suggest RF files earn more than RM.

 

But actually, some RM sales terms are very close to RF, and many sales of RF files are actually RM-non-exclusive.

 

Bottom line: there's no definitive answer to your question.

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If you have a look at your keywording it may help you, the image below has a lot of inappropriate keywords, IE bass fishing? fishing line? etc, have a look at them and adjust as necessary only put what you can actually see! I hope this helps you!

Girl from the shore lures dolphins 

- Image ID: RB1H5K

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Thank you, yesterday all day changed keywords and signatures, as far as I could, the problem is the lack of knowledge of the English language and I fully trust the computer translation. Once again thanks for the specified problem I hope it will help.

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4 hours ago, IgorK48 said:

Thank you, yesterday all day changed keywords and signatures, as far as I could, the problem is the lack of knowledge of the English language and I fully trust the computer translation. Once again thanks for the specified problem I hope it will help.

I really sympathise with the language issue. :-(

 

Other than that, it's best to manage your expectations. I had >800 files and had been on Alamy for about eight months before I had my first reported sale, and that was in 2009, when Alamy's total collection was far, far smaller than it is now. Alamy isn't a big-selling site for general stock.

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Remember that if you have many similars with the same keywords they will all show up when someone searches for those keywords.  But if the searcher only zooms in on one or two that will lower your Click-to-zoom rate, which will result in your images being placed lower in search results.  Don't upload too many similars; choose only the best.

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On 19/01/2019 at 16:49, Ollie said:

Remember that if you have many similars with the same keywords they will all show up when someone searches for those keywords.  But if the searcher only zooms in on one or two that will lower your Click-to-zoom rate, which will result in your images being placed lower in search results.  Don't upload too many similars; choose only the best.

Which in itself can be a bit daft.

 

Lets take for example, "buckinghamshire". I may upload quite a number of photos with that as a keyword, as it was taken there, but may be of a more specific subject in "Buckinghamshire"

 

But the search results won't discriminate, so potentially lots of valid views given a generic search. Not sure why someone should be ranked lower because things like that can take place...

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2 minutes ago, chris_rabe said:

But the search results won't discriminate,

They will if you only supertag "buckinghamshire" for images where the location is important. "A Georgian house in Aylesbury" probably doesn't need Bucks. as a supertag.

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1 minute ago, spacecadet said:

They will if you only supertag "buckinghamshire" for images where the location is important. "A Georgian house in Aylesbury" probably doesn't need Bucks. as a supertag.

 

Interesting point - by the way, only using Bucks as a random example, as I don't have a lot of photos from there!

 

But what you say has given me reason to question some of my use of supertags...

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1 hour ago, chris_rabe said:

 

Interesting point - by the way, only using Bucks as a random example, as I don't have a lot of photos from there!

 

But what you say has given me reason to question some of my use of supertags...

Well, there's some debate about it but supers are supposed to rank higher and I've worked on the assumption that they do.

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