selling Photos and Sales

[Roger54]

Hello Friends,

I recently joined Alamy and I am wondering how this site works to sell the photos. I have posted about 170 pictures on this site. Over 100 have been optimized to goos discoverability and yet I do not see any views on my image manager. Is it too early to expect? I have been here only for 2 weeks.

 

another question regarding QC. If I upload a batch for 30 pictures and if they find one bad picture they reject all which i feel is very odd and it is a waste of time to re upload them again. In that case will it make sense to upload pictures individually instead of a batch?

 

thank you for your inputs, suggestions and advise.

 

[Sally]

Please search the forum for other threads about optimising discoverability. The advice is pretty much to ignore this, just put in relevant tags. You will harm your own ranking if searches turn up your photos but are irrelevant or only tangentially related to the search term.

 

Yes, it is too early probably to see views, let alone zooms.

 

The QC system is designed to encourage contributors to do quality control themselves, and not submit anything unlikely to fail. If you continue to fail QC then you may be given a temporary ban on uploading until you sort out what you are doing wrong.

Batch size really doesn’t matter and I suggest you do not submit photos one by one. The one that failed will be marked and the reason why indicated, so you can either leave it out next time or edit it. 

 

There is a wealth of advice on the forum, so it’s worthwhile investing time to do some searches here for all of the questions you’ll have.

[Inchiquin]

Alamy has over 150 million photos. So your collection is about a millionth of the whole. It's not really surprising if you've had no views in just two weeks. You have to be patient and upload many more images.

 

Alamy QC operates just like any other quality control system in a commercial environment. Suppliers to any business are expected to meet the require standards. If one item doesn't meet that standard then it proves that you're not capable of meeting the standard consistently, so the whole batch is rejected. It's perfectly normal. The onus is on you to produce work to the required standard, and a rejection should encourage you to re-double your efforts to get it right next time.

 

Submitting one image at a time is only going to cause Alamy a great deal more work and annoy them intensely. How do you think Sainsburys would react if their suppliers submitted one tomato at a time?

 

The answer is to study carefully the image that failed and make sure you don't make the same mistake again.

 

Alan

[Matt Ashmore]

6 hours ago, Roger54 said:

If I upload a batch for 30 pictures and if they find one bad picture they reject all which i feel is very odd and it is a waste of time to re upload them again. In that case will it make sense to upload pictures individually instead of a batch?

 

In addition to what Sally just said, uploading in different submissions will make no difference. When Alamy QC your images, they just take everything that you have waiting to be QCed regardless of how many submissions you pushed them to Alamy in and they pick a random sample from these photos to check. If they find one failure, the whole lot get rejected regardless of the number of submissions used to get those photos to alamy.

[Starsphinx]

Hi and welcome.
First off you need much much bigger numbers before you can expect to see any return.  When I joined last summer I gave myself lines of 6 months and 800 images before I expected to see any results - that I managed results before those limits is very unusual.  Give it a year and have 10 times as many images before you start worrying about no results.

Secondly, don't put too much importance on getting "good discoverability" - for some reason it is set on numbers and it can be tempting to use irrelevant keywords to make up the numbers but doing so will actually hurt your chances of sales because your images will appear in irrelevant searches.  The most important thing is to make sure every keyword is relevant to that image. Your images of Stonehenge include the tags "costly" "metallic" "miniature" "mini" which do not appear to be directly related to the image (I know it is costly to visit but not really a tag).  With images of animals birds and plants it is really useful to put the species name and latin name - so for racoon you would want Procyon lotor in the title.  Yes that does mean having to find out what exactly it was you took a picture of which can mean some serious research - but the forum is great for that you will see a lot of threads on help identifying plants and animals.
Finally, the QC system is very clearly described as are the requirements for images -  batch QC is a very normal system in industry where there simply is not the funds to pay people to check every single product.  Alamy cannot pay people to check every image we send - so we are expected to do it right.  Check images at 100% - and check again.  If you have any doubt whatsoever then do not submit.  My own workflow involves a minimum of 3 checks - when I decide what images to process, then when I process, and then when I put a batch together.  I may throw in a couple more checks depending on the time between steps.

[george]

you also need to take more care with RF/RM 
if there are people in the image even a finger (!) you say there are people and whether or not you have a model release.

the same with property. you seem to be marking everything as RF. 
if you check out the contributor section there is information there about this 

[peter_m]

 

I will use this topic to ask something I could not find the exact answer from the forum. When there is a sale after how long will it appear in my dashboard? Views and zooms are updated once a day in the morning ... If I have correctly learned from the forum - sales may occur a few months after they happened? For example - I have 2 zooms of search that has a total of 2 zooms. Is it possible to have a sale that I will see after time?

[Marianne]

6 hours ago, peter_m said:

 

I will use this topic to ask something I could not find the exact answer from the forum. When there is a sale after how long will it appear in my dashboard? Views and zooms are updated once a day in the morning ... If I have correctly learned from the forum - sales may occur a few months after they happened? For example - I have 2 zooms of search that has a total of 2 zooms. Is it possible to have a sale that I will see after time?

 

Peter,

 

Even if your image is the only zoom, it may not mean a sale, but it does increase the chances for one.

 

Sales related to a zoom generally show up around two months later although they could show up even a year later. Magazines usually plan out their publications 2 months in advance but stories can be planned out much further in advance than that, and they can also end up getting delayed during the process. Sales won't show up until the sale is invoiced by the publication, which is generally upon publication, hence the most common 2-month interval. Newspapers, on the other hand, may zoom and purchase a photo on the same day, although depending on their invoicing arrangement with Alamy, they may not be required to invoice it until some time later. Once an image is invoiced, it still needs to be paid. So, even once you have a sale, it may be some months before you see the balance cleared in your account. Then, you need to meet the minimum payout before Alamy actually pays you. 

 

You may also see sales of images that have never been zoomed. I'd say nearly half of my sales over the years were never zoomed. And I've had dozens of images that were the only zoom and yet did not result in a sale. So, bottom line, you can feel optimistic that if your image was the only zoom for a search term, the chance of a sale is increased, but it is not a sure thing until you see that cleared balance in your account. Good luck. 

[peter_m]

13 minutes ago, Marianne said:

 

Peter,

 

Even if your image is the only zoom, it may not mean a sale, but it does increase the chances for one.

 

Sales related to a zoom generally show up around two months later although they could show up even a year later. Magazines usually plan out their publications 2 months in advance but stories can be planned out much further in advance than that, and they can also end up getting delayed during the process. Sales won't show up until the sale is invoiced by the publication, which is generally upon publication, hence the most common 2-month interval. Newspapers, on the other hand, may zoom and purchase a photo on the same day, although depending on their invoicing arrangement with Alamy, they may not be required to invoice it until some time later. Once an image is invoiced, it still needs to be paid. So, even once you have a sale, it may be some months before you see the balance cleared in your account. Then, you need to meet the minimum payout before Alamy actually pays you. 

 

You may also see sales of images that have never been zoomed. I'd say nearly half of my sales over the years were never zoomed. And I've had dozens of images that were the only zoom and yet did not result in a sale. So, bottom line, you can feel optimistic that if your image was the only zoom for a search term, the chance of a sale is increased, but it is not a sure thing until you see that cleared balance in your account. Good luck. 

 

Marianne,  Thanks for the detailed answer, I already know. It also has patience. That is why in other topics the question "when did you get the first sale" the answer is in a few months.

[Roger54]

On 1/18/2019 at 05:13, Sally said:

Please search the forum for other threads about optimising discoverability. The advice is pretty much to ignore this, just put in relevant tags. You will harm your own ranking if searches turn up your photos but are irrelevant or only tangentially related to the search term.

 

Yes, it is too early probably to see views, let alone zooms.

 

The QC system is designed to encourage contributors to do quality control themselves, and not submit anything unlikely to fail. If you continue to fail QC then you may be given a temporary ban on uploading until you sort out what you are doing wrong.

Batch size really doesn’t matter and I suggest you do not submit photos one by one. The one that failed will be marked and the reason why indicated, so you can either leave it out next time or edit it. 

 

There is a wealth of advice on the forum, so it’s worthwhile investing time to do some searches here for all of the questions you’ll have.

Thank you Sally for the details and inputs. The above information definitely is very helpful

[Roger54]

On 1/18/2019 at 05:28, george said:

you also need to take more care with RF/RM 
if there are people in the image even a finger (!) you say there are people and whether or not you have a model release.

the same with property. you seem to be marking everything as RF. 
if you check out the contributor section there is information there about this 

I am still confused about RF/RM selection. After reading few more comments related to this topic it appears that it is mostly a personal preference. Am I correct in assuming this? Can someone explain me in lay terms the difference. I am used to Shutterstock and they don't accept any images with anyone who is recognizable.

[Cryptoprocta]

1 hour ago, Roger54 said:

I am still confused about RF/RM selection. After reading few more comments related to this topic it appears that it is mostly a personal preference. Am I correct in assuming this? Can someone explain me in lay terms the difference. I am used to Shutterstock and they don't accept any images with anyone who is recognizable.

Don't get mixed up.

RF/RM and Editorial/Commercial are two entirely different things.

 

RF/RM is a licensing distinction. RF means that buyers can use a file many times in many different ways. On some sites, that may be limited to a certain number of imprints, or exclude e.g. use on items for sale etc. That differs from agency to agency.

RM 'should' mean that the rights of the buyer in using the file are 'managed' meaning they should only use them for certain purposes.

Logically, therefore, RF should cost a lot more than RM. But that doesn't happen.

(RM with exclusivity, meaning the buyer buys out all rights for a certain use or uses, cost more. E.g. they might buy all rights to an image as a book cover for ten years, or all rights in a calendar in Scotland for two years etc etc. Then your image can't be sold for these uses to other buyers for the same use in the specified timescale, so as you are giving up possible future sales, the buyer should pay more. That doesn't happen very often via Alamy.)

 

All files may be used as editorial, but I notice there is a box you can tick on Alamy which prevents editorial use. My tiny brain hasn't come up with a reason why anyone would want to prevent editorial use, but I'm open to being educated.

Files may be used commercially if they have nothing which might be regarded as property in them, or if there are all appropriate model or property releases. Alamy is particularly tight on what they regard as 'needing releases'; as said above, even a bit of a finger needs a release, and essentially just about all property. What other agencies accept has no relevance to Alamy, and vice versa. There are things Alamy accepts that at least one micro won't accept.

 

If you have files selling as RF elsewhere, you must sell them as RF on Alamy. However, if there are hints of people or property, you should mark them as RF-editorial on Alamy, even if another agency has accepted them as commerical.