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Good morning, dear forum members.

I'm sure you've talked about this topic many times , but I would really appreciate if you could invest a little more time and help me to find out what I am missing.

First of all, I want to tell you some facts about me and my pictures - just to clarify a few things.

 

- I am Olympus Visionary/Ambassador from Switzerland

- My pictures are constantly published at National Geographic and winning different contests, awards etc.

- All my pictures are exclusively at Alamy and I don't sell my pictures anywhere else

- QC accepts 100% of my uploads, not a single one has been rejected

- All my pictures are RM only

- All my pictures got 100% info and optimized discoverability

 

A short story why RM only.

Few years ago I did a small test and uploaded 10 pictures to Shutterstock.

There have been many downloads every day and I've received around 400$ after 6 months.

That was fine and I almost decided to upload ~4000 pictures there.

But something happened just before I did, and now I'm glad it happened.

One day I came to a supermarket and was shocked to see "Kleenex" tissue packages with my picture on the box.

There were tons of those on every wall.

I called Kleenex and they told me it was a download from Shutterstock.

RF means they can use it as they wish, without limits.

There have been hundreeds of thousands packages in every city, in every supermarket.

I got 20 cent  for the download.

 

More examples came soon after that.

SNCF, DB and SBB used my pictures in Paris central station as well as many stations in different towns of France, Germany and Switzerland.

Huge posters everywhere, 20 cents for me.

Dozens of books were published, using my pictures, 20 cents for me.

Every corner of swiss travel websites was full of my pics, again 20 cents for me.

Those are only few examples, why I decided to go RM only in the future.

 

Since Alamy is the last and only Website which pays 50% (im exclusive) and got RM option, I decided to upload some pictures for a test here.

Half a year has passed, but no sales.

 

Please have a short look at my Portfolio.

I cover almost all types of photography with the focus on macro, wildlife, landscapes, astro, travels, portraits, low light, artistic light paintings etc.

 

I would like to know what I do wrong at Alamy now.

I know that the test amount of my pictures is very low but is this really  the only problem?

 

I thank you for your time.

Kind Regards

Orest

Olympus Visionary

 

 

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Welcome to Alamy!  Home to 155 million stock images. 

 

However good your images are on Alamy you only have 178.

You will need a LOT more before you start to see sales.

 

As a rough guide the average is 1 sale per 1000 images per month.

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5 minutes ago, Thyrsis said:

Welcome to Alamy!  Home to 155 million stock images. 

 

However good your images are on Alamy you only have 178.

You will need a LOT more before you start to see sales.

 

As a rough guide the average is 1 sale per 1000 images per month.

 

Thank you.

So it's all about quantity, not quality?

 

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Hello Orest - I believe it is quantity AND quality  - I have less than 600 images with 6 sales last year and 1 so far this year - I intend to upload many more this year  :-) your image sare very good by the way :-)

 

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Improve the diversity of your image collection. You have many images of the same animals.

 

Fine-tune and improve your key wording. Use name of breeds, species and Latin names also for plants and animals. There are threads giving advice. Searching the forum often best done from Google - including the search words: alamy forum

 

"Use Alamy Measures" - "All of Alamy" to see what has been searched for, and how,  by buyers. On that page use

 

%switzerland

 

f.inst. to find searches including Switzerland. 

 

Niels

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5 hours ago, orest said:

Good morning, dear forum members.

I'm sure you've talked about this topic many times , but I would really appreciate if you could invest a little more time and help me to find out what I am missing.

 

 

You have some gorgeous pix (and I particularly liked the shot of the Loch Ness Monster!). You've had some unfortunate experiences with microstock, and I'm sure you will do better at Alamy. However... you will need to add many more pix, and 2019 simply isn't the golden age of stock photography...

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Beautiful images, but your keywording needs improving. Words like Olympus, Zuiko, microfourthirds, professional, ambassador, and nationalgeographic tell me nothing about the image of the cow I looked at. These keywords can only help to destroy your overall ranking as they're not relevant. Poor ranking means images may not be seen as most images tend to be sold from the first few hundred returned for a search. So to recap. Better captions, more relevant keywords, less similar images with increased diversity and increased portfolio size. Oh and don't get wrapped up in trying to get optimised discoverability, it just isn't necessary, keep the keywords relevant to the subject of the image. 

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Thank you for your answers. 

Please notice, I uploaded those images in few portions to see what QC accepts and to learn how to upload, tag etc here. 

Those are only few examples of my collection which is over 10 years old. 

And yes I‘ve got many marmots. 

That was just another test :) 

I‘ll upload another 6000 images. 

That will take time.

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And for the future, don't add keywords just to get the discoverability bar green. There are lots of opinions on it on the forum, mine is to just ignore it. Add all the directly relevant keywords (who, doing what, why, where, when) and let it that. 

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6 hours ago, orest said:

- I am Olympus Visionary/Ambassador from Switzerland

- My pictures are constantly published at National Geographic and winning different contests, awards et

 

If your pics are being constantly published in National geographic why are you even considering Alamy? There are still Boutique agencies out there offering at least 50/50 commission. submit a varied selection of your best pics to one of the specialist nature/environmental agencies and see what happens. Surely constant or even regular publication in Nat Geo should put you in line for commission work from them?

 

Apart from that Colin woods speaks a lot of sense!

 

Being an Olympus ambassador and winning awards and contests often has no relevance in the world of stock photography- yu need to provide what the customer wants not what you want to photograph.

 

Regen

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It's really helpful to read your advices about keywords.

I thought I need to somehow complete all 50 keywords to make my pictures discoverable.

What I didn't know is that I can put few words together to describe the pictures more precisely.

Optimising discoverability takes 90% of upload times.

If I ignore that and add all the directly relevant keywords (who, doing what, why, where, when), I'll win a lot of time.

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20 minutes ago, orest said:

Thank you for your answers. 

Please notice, I uploaded those images in few portions to see what QC accepts and to learn how to upload, tag etc here. 

Those are only few examples of my collection which is over 10 years old. 

And yes I‘ve got many marmots. 

That was just another test :) 

I‘ll upload another 6000 images. 

That will take time.

 

QC here works different from the Micro's or from virtually every other stock agency: here the collection is not being curated. Only the image quality is checked. And not even that for every image: contributors are expected to be professionals and know what good quality is, and inspect every image at 100% or higher.

There are spot checks though and at least one image in every upload is checked. If that one fails, there are penalties. Not as severe as they used to, but still.

 

wim

 

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17 minutes ago, regen said:

 

If your pics are being constantly published in National geographic why are you even considering Alamy? There are still Boutique agencies out there offering at least 50/50 commission. submit a varied selection of your best pics to one of the specialist nature/environmental agencies and see what happens. Surely constant or even regular publication in Nat Geo should put you in line for commission work from them?

 

Apart from that Colin woods speaks a lot of sense!

 

Being an Olympus ambassador and winning awards and contests often has no relevance in the world of stock photography- yu need to provide what the customer wants not what you want to photograph.

 

Regen

Things are not that easy.

I tried that every year since 15 years.

You can travel, get equipment you need, meet talented photographers and learn a lot.

But getting paid is a completely different world.

 

What people don't know is the truth behind those beautiful nature/wildlife/landscape etc. pictures.

Great and famous photographers are living in small flats and cannot afford a car.

You can see their pictures on the cover of Magazines In Germany, in Switzerland and you may think wow, lucky ones.

But things are different in real life.

 

I am glad that I left my country behind (Ukraine) and moved to Poland, Germany and then Switzerland.

I studied Pharmacy and got a great job now.

Thats how I pay bills and everything else.

But thats a different topic and I don't want to start that discussion.

 

To come back to your question - I've got around 15.000 high quality pictures which I would like to upload in order to earn some money with them.

I got invitations from Getty 11 years ago.

I didn't like how they forced me to RF and the payment is a joke.

I don't want to see Starbucks or Nivea or Apple using my pics while paying me 20 cents, that's why Alamy and RM.

I loved this Stock website since my very first visit.

And I really want to cooperate with Alamy and fight against Microstock.

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Yeah, passing quality control doesn't mean a great deal - I have uploaded some stinkers and not had one single rejection to date with 400 images :)

 

I try not to upload stinkers though :)

 

And as others have said - variety. It's all good having the best landscape photo ever taken in Switzerland - but if nobody is searching this particular agency for that, well then it won't be found. Also, you have a lot of other photos to contend with, and worse ones than yours may be listed near the top.

 

 

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1 hour ago, orest said:

And yes I‘ve got many marmots. 

That was just another test :) 

I‘ll upload another 6000 images.

 

About those 6000: that is a very good idea, but I would start with only 1 image per subject. Just choose your best. And do look at All of Alamy if clients are actually searching for such subjects at all on Alamy.

Set AoA to the earliest date (1 year + the current month).

Set results per page to 100.

Set UCO highest first to see how many searches there have been for a chosen keyword or key-phrase.

Set views lowest first to identify gaps in the collection and find subjects to shoot or ways to shoot a subject. Or just how to keyword them ;-)

Search using the wildcards %% like %Swiss% or %marmot% or %Matterhorn% or %mountain% - it's a database thing. Try it without to see what difference it makes.

You'll notice that clients here are looking for different things than your images. And if they do look for a brown swiss cow, there are 1943 images on Alamy to compete with.

 

Log out of Alamy and try searching for an image as if you were a client.

Don't forget to keyword in UK and US English if applicable

 

Your cow image P8KD3H has been included in this page by Alamy: https://www.alamyimages.fr/photos-images/funny-animal-meme.html

And when I put that image in Google Images, it comes back on 15 pages #10. So I hope you get paid for some of those publications somewhere if you haven't sold it here on Alamy.

Example 1; example 2 - it looks like your cow is becoming famous.

 

wim

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11 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

 

About those 6000: that is a very good idea, but I would start with only 1 image per subject. Just choose your best. And do look at All of Alamy if clients are actually searching for such subjects at all on Alamy.

Set AoA to the earliest date (1 year + the current month).

Set results per page to 100.

Set UCO highest first to see how many searches there have been for a chosen keyword or key-phrase.

Set views lowest first to identify gaps in the collection and find subjects to shoot or ways to shoot a subject. Or just how to keyword them ;-)

Search using the wildcards %% like %Swiss% or %marmot% or %Matterhorn% or %mountain% - it's a database thing. Try it without to see what difference it makes.

You'll notice that clients here are looking for different things than your images. And if they do look for a brown swiss cow, there are 1943 images on Alamy to compete with.

 

Log out of Alamy and try searching for an image as if you were a client.

Don't forget to keyword in UK and US English if applicable

 

Your cow image P8KD3H has been included in this page by Alamy: https://www.alamyimages.fr/photos-images/funny-animal-meme.html

And when I put that image in Google Images, it comes back on 15 pages #10. So I hope you get paid for some of those publications somewhere if you haven't sold it here on Alamy.

Example 1; example 2 - it looks like your cow is becoming famous.

 

wim

 

My  images has been stolen and used hundreds of thousands times in many countries. Nobody cares. 

The cow has been Image of the Day on Deviantart etc. Just like tons of other pictures. People downloaded it, used it, nobody asked me. 

I NEVER got paid for anything.

 

By the way, I saw postcards and posters of my pictures in few countries while traveling. LOL? No. 

It was sad. 

But what can I do?

Nothing. 

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1 hour ago, orest said:

I thought I need to somehow complete all 50 keywords to make my pictures discoverable.

Certainly you do not. I think that the discoverability bar is Alamy trying to be a bit social-media ish. I have photos that sell well with just half a dozen keywords. Some of my photos do go green, especially pictures of the kids when I put their ages in (in various formats like 4 yr old, 4 yrs old, 4 year old........). Others require just a few words to describe them. Adding irrelevant keywords is not harmless either. If you have irrelevant keywords then your images will be returned in irrelevant searches which means that your CTR will drop. CTR is a component of your ranking in the Alamy heirarchy and the lower your ranking then the further down you will be on images that show up for a search term. This discoverability bar has been the source of much confusion (you are not the first by any means to make this mistake) and, in my own opinion,  should be deleted. 

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2 minutes ago, orest said:

 

My  images has been stolen and used hundreds of thousands times in many countries. Nobody cares. 

The cow has been Image of the Day on Deviantart etc. Just like tons of other pictures. People downloaded it, used it, nobody asked me. 

I NEVER got paid for anything.

 

Aiaiaii that's not good. (Yes it has happened to me of course.)

Have you checked your dashboard page if nothing has been sold through Alamy?

(You have to be logged in for the link to work.)

 

wim

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32 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

 

About those 6000: that is a very good idea, but I would start with only 1 image per subject. Just choose your best. And do look at All of Alamy if clients are actually searching for such subjects at all on Alamy.

Set AoA to the earliest date (1 year + the current month).

Set results per page to 100.

Set UCO highest first to see how many searches there have been for a chosen keyword or key-phrase.

Set views lowest first to identify gaps in the collection and find subjects to shoot or ways to shoot a subject. Or just how to keyword them ;-)

Search using the wildcards %% like %Swiss% or %marmot% or %Matterhorn% or %mountain% - it's a database thing. Try it without to see what difference it makes.

You'll notice that clients here are looking for different things than your images. And if they do look for a brown swiss cow, there are 1943 images on Alamy to compete with.

 

Log out of Alamy and try searching for an image as if you were a client.

Don't forget to keyword in UK and US English if applicable

 

Your cow image P8KD3H has been included in this page by Alamy: https://www.alamyimages.fr/photos-images/funny-animal-meme.html

And when I put that image in Google Images, it comes back on 15 pages #10. So I hope you get paid for some of those publications somewhere if you haven't sold it here on Alamy.

Example 1; example 2 - it looks like your cow is becoming famous.

 

wim

Wim you should make a Youtube video of this

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@OP: I'm guessing your experience with SS was over ten years ago, as 25c has been the minimum there for that length of time. It's a pity you didn't read your contract, and SS's T&C, because Kleenex told you wrong. Via SS, usage on merchandise requires an enhanced licence and you should have got much more for that sale.

You'll see that most agencies have it in your contract that you do not contact customers directly in the first instance. I don't know about SS as I've never submitted there, but it's in your Alamy contract that you must contact them first if you suspect any misuses, and that's pretty general.

If you had stuck with SS that long ago and submitted all your images there, and to others, you would likely have earned a LOT of money by now. Nowadays the market is just about saturated in most subjects.

I also hope that when you submit to Deviant Art and other photo-sharing sites and social media, you put big watermarks on your images. It doesn't stop your files being hotlinked to , but it certainly deters a lot of would-be image thieves, though obviously the determined and fairly skilful could deal with the watermark.

Don't imagine that only having your images on Alamy will save you from image thieves. As soon as someone has bought your image legitimately and puts it online, it is unprotected and essentially 'up for grabs', and it's not always possible to retrieve a payment, even when your copyright and Alamy is in the file metadata.

Alamy is not good for getting lots of sales. Be aware that nowadays, some Alamy RM contracts have such wide terms they might as well be RF, and that some prices on these may not be high (I've had three under $1 net). You might also hit the jackpot, and get a nice high-value sale, which apparently are still occasionally had.

Do your own research in this forum and in independent forums and do your own experimenting to see which agencies serve your images best.

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