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1 hour ago, Nick Hatton said:

Could it be that so many sales have come in that the system can't cope with it?

 

21 minutes ago, Russell said:

It's going to take me hours to log all those zooms that are building up for my portfolio while measures is down :D

 

I think we should be compensated with - say, an upgrade of our CTRs to 10% above the Alamy average. A raising of my search results from page 10 to 5 will be most welcome, thank you very much.

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1 minute ago, Richard Baker said:

 

 

I think we should be compensated with - say, an upgrade of our CTRs to 10% above the Alamy average. A raising of my search results from page 10 to 5 will be most welcome, thank you very much.

If all user increase their CTR with 10% ... all will stay in same position in search :)

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6 hours ago, Sally said:

I agree, however it has now been a week. I don’t think I have come across an online IT problem that took so long to fix before. 

Weeks and months are par for the course at G. The speculation is what proportion is incompetence and what proportion reflects their attitude towards suppliers.

Seems their incompetence and arrogance is spreading to other agencies.

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I'm wondering if the issues with Alamy Measures, or more likely the time being taken to bring about a fix, are linked in some way with the reducing numbers of images in the Alamy collection. A week or two ago the Alamy front page was reporting some 158 million images, this is now down to a little under 156 million. Makes me think there is some tinkering going on in the background, though it could be that some contributors may have started proceedings for leaving and deleting their portfolio over the reduction to 40% commission.

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5 hours ago, Shergar said:

Is Jeff still with us?

 

Well, several hundred thousand of his images still are, under his several different pseudos.

 

DD

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4 hours ago, Colblimp said:

Logging zooms?  What is this sorcery?!

:D:D But seriously, I use the flags in Lightroom to indicate zoomed images. Sales are automatically identified if you use the Alamy Bridge plugin, so I have "Smart Collections" to show images sold, images zoomed, images zoomed & sold.

 

Useful if you have images which have never sold images but have been zoomed, when it comes to reviewing images and/or keywords/captions

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18 hours ago, Joseph Clemson said:

I'm wondering if the issues with Alamy Measures, or more likely the time being taken to bring about a fix, are linked in some way with the reducing numbers of images in the Alamy collection. A week or two ago the Alamy front page was reporting some 158 million images, this is now down to a little under 156 million. Makes me think there is some tinkering going on in the background, though it could be that some contributors may have started proceedings for leaving and deleting their portfolio over the reduction to 40% commission.

 

I've checked the numbers after reading your post. Yesterday it was 155.9 million....today, another bunch down...155.5 million. Is that normal?

 

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Last Thursday I wrote to Alamy about the issues with the measures and they replied saying that IT was aware of it. Now that it is more than a week later with one tweet stating the same thing I thought I would chime in here.

 

Over the past year my sales were showing momentum and I was contributing a lot.  Then in November this nearly came to a hault with only two sales since then resulting in under 20.00US.  From December 4 until last week I had no sales but dozens and dozens of zooms.  I, as well as others, count on measures for motivation.  With no or low sales, the zooms and views measures contribute to motivating me to submit.  Add in the cut of 20% from non-exclusive sales starting next week and the lack of transparent communication of what is wrong, it is disheartening.

 

On a personal note, from 2004 until 2006 I lived in a Maori community and had a blog that detailed my experience via writings and photos.  One day I went to the blog and it turned out the company decided they couldn't afford the server space anymore so disbanded the company without informing those who had blogs on it (ballofdirt.com).  Needless to say I trusted the company and was burned.  Not only did a lot of work/time/energy/money go into producing and maintaining the blog, I lost that entire period of time in terms of documentation (I learned since that one cannot fully trust IT based platform companies).  When I wrote the guy in charge of it asking to get a copy of all of my blogs and photos, he wrote and apologized saying everything was gone.  There was, according to them, no way to retrieve the data.

 

So my point is that I am justifiably, based on the said experience, that this may happen again here with Alamy.  The lack of transparent communication and urgency in regards to contributors measures being updated is just one red flag amongst several that makes me nervous.  It has been over a week since the update, the weekend is here, and the silence is deafening outside of the vague tweet which mirrored their response to me last Thursday when I wrote that the measures weren't working.

 

In the grand scheme of things, a lot of trust was lost with the 20% cut that starts next week. to stay relatively silent on the problems with the measures updates doesn't help build that trust back up.  Low/no sales, no measures, no communication, rate cuts.....for the sake of the contributors can Alamy please let us know exactly what is going on so that we can make informed decisions on how to proceed with our portfolios.

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5 hours ago, MarkK said:

Last Thursday I wrote to Alamy about the issues with the measures and they replied saying that IT was aware of it. Now that it is more than a week later with one tweet stating the same thing I thought I would chime in here.

 

Over the past year my sales were showing momentum and I was contributing a lot.  Then in November this nearly came to a hault with only two sales since then resulting in under 20.00US.  From December 4 until last week I had no sales but dozens and dozens of zooms.  I, as well as others, count on measures for motivation.  With no or low sales, the zooms and views measures contribute to motivating me to submit.  Add in the cut of 20% from non-exclusive sales starting next week and the lack of transparent communication of what is wrong, it is disheartening.

 

On a personal note, from 2004 until 2006 I lived in a Maori community and had a blog that detailed my experience via writings and photos.  One day I went to the blog and it turned out the company decided they couldn't afford the server space anymore so disbanded the company without informing those who had blogs on it (ballofdirt.com).  Needless to say I trusted the company and was burned.  Not only did a lot of work/time/energy/money go into producing and maintaining the blog, I lost that entire period of time in terms of documentation (I learned since that one cannot fully trust IT based platform companies).  When I wrote the guy in charge of it asking to get a copy of all of my blogs and photos, he wrote and apologized saying everything was gone.  There was, according to them, no way to retrieve the data.

 

So my point is that I am justifiably, based on the said experience, that this may happen again here with Alamy.  The lack of transparent communication and urgency in regards to contributors measures being updated is just one red flag amongst several that makes me nervous.  It has been over a week since the update, the weekend is here, and the silence is deafening outside of the vague tweet which mirrored their response to me last Thursday when I wrote that the measures weren't working.

 

In the grand scheme of things, a lot of trust was lost with the 20% cut that starts next week. to stay relatively silent on the problems with the measures updates doesn't help build that trust back up.  Low/no sales, no measures, no communication, rate cuts.....for the sake of the contributors can Alamy please let us know exactly what is going on so that we can make informed decisions on how to proceed with our portfolios.

You have put this way better than myself.

Although thankfully I have not had such an appalling result as yourself I have had dealings with companies online - and as you say while there are not any big red flags there are enough little ones.  One or 2 is one of those things - this many and my "spidey senses" tingle.  I am actively increasing my number of baskets - and my ways of adding eggs to them.

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15 hours ago, MarkK said:

Last Thursday I wrote to Alamy about the issues with the measures and they replied saying that IT was aware of it. Now that it is more than a week later with one tweet stating the same thing I thought I would chime in here.

 

Over the past year my sales were showing momentum and I was contributing a lot.  Then in November this nearly came to a hault with only two sales since then resulting in under 20.00US.  From December 4 until last week I had no sales but dozens and dozens of zooms.  I, as well as others, count on measures for motivation.  With no or low sales, the zooms and views measures contribute to motivating me to submit.  Add in the cut of 20% from non-exclusive sales starting next week and the lack of transparent communication of what is wrong, it is disheartening.

 

On a personal note, from 2004 until 2006 I lived in a Maori community and had a blog that detailed my experience via writings and photos.  One day I went to the blog and it turned out the company decided they couldn't afford the server space anymore so disbanded the company without informing those who had blogs on it (ballofdirt.com).  Needless to say I trusted the company and was burned.  Not only did a lot of work/time/energy/money go into producing and maintaining the blog, I lost that entire period of time in terms of documentation (I learned since that one cannot fully trust IT based platform companies).  When I wrote the guy in charge of it asking to get a copy of all of my blogs and photos, he wrote and apologized saying everything was gone.  There was, according to them, no way to retrieve the data.

 

So my point is that I am justifiably, based on the said experience, that this may happen again here with Alamy.  The lack of transparent communication and urgency in regards to contributors measures being updated is just one red flag amongst several that makes me nervous.  It has been over a week since the update, the weekend is here, and the silence is deafening outside of the vague tweet which mirrored their response to me last Thursday when I wrote that the measures weren't working.

 

In the grand scheme of things, a lot of trust was lost with the 20% cut that starts next week. to stay relatively silent on the problems with the measures updates doesn't help build that trust back up.  Low/no sales, no measures, no communication, rate cuts.....for the sake of the contributors can Alamy please let us know exactly what is going on so that we can make informed decisions on how to proceed with our portfolios.

Ditto. My trust is lost. For the first few years, all my images were exclusive to Alamy, all my news images were exclusive, too. Foolish. It has been a learning curve, and I will never trust Alamy again.

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On 15/02/2019 at 13:54, shearwater said:

 

I've checked the numbers after reading your post. Yesterday it was 155.9 million....today, another bunch down...155.5 million. Is that normal?

 

 

No, a reduction in the overall number of images on Alamy is not normal, it usually increases by tens of thousands on a daily basis. I did wonder if the overall reduction is linked to measures not updating, but in that case one would expect the number to be static.  We can only only hope the lost images include large numbers of poorly taken and keyworded similars, which we don't need. It does no one here any good if high quality photography disappears from the site and the overall reputation of Alamy is diminished. 

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37 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

 

No, a reduction in the overall number of images on Alamy is not normal, it usually increases by tens of thousands on a daily basis. I did wonder if the overall reduction is linked to measures not updating, but in that case one would expect the number to be static.  We can only only hope the lost images include large numbers of poorly taken and keyworded similars, which we don't need. It does no one here any good if high quality photography disappears from the site and the overall reputation of Alamy is diminished. 

 

I wonder if this is more to do with an agreement between agencies changing (i.e. Alamy are no longer acting as a distributor for some other agency/agencies) than individual contributors' images being removed.

 

19 minutes ago, gardenbush said:

Joseph - if Alamy is actually removing images of low quality, would you expect the Company to advise the image contributor that they have done this?

Regards Colin

 

I would like to think so.

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19 minutes ago, gardenbush said:

Joseph - if Alamy is actually removing images of low quality, would you expect the Company to advise the image contributor that they have done this?

Regards Colin

 

My comment about low quality images being removed was based more on tongue-in-cheek hopefulness than any realistic expectation.The question of consulting the contributor doesn't arise because Alamy are unlikely to take this (desirable) action. 

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On 2/15/2019 at 17:08, MarkK said:

On a personal note, from 2004 until 2006 I lived in a Maori community and had a blog that detailed my experience via writings and photos.  One day I went to the blog and it turned out the company decided they couldn't afford the server space anymore so disbanded the company without informing those who had blogs on it (ballofdirt.com).  Needless to say I trusted the company and was burned.  Not only did a lot of work/time/energy/money go into producing and maintaining the blog, I lost that entire period of time in terms of documentation (I learned since that one cannot fully trust IT based platform companies).  When I wrote the guy in charge of it asking to get a copy of all of my blogs and photos, he wrote and apologized saying everything was gone.  There was, according to them, no way to retrieve the data.

 

You did try the Waybackmachine?

https://web.archive.org/web/20080101000000*/ballofdirt.com

 

wim

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2 hours ago, wiskerke said:

 

You did try the Waybackmachine?

https://web.archive.org/web/20080101000000*/ballofdirt.com

 

wim

wow!! I am glad I wrote about having lost the site years ago as I was unable to locate the lost blog until now.  I haven't clicked on each of the entries but it looks like each are there, entries and photos, which I will I will be pulling and archiving which I couldn't do, according to the ex owners of the site, when they shut the site down out of the blue....THANK YOU!  I have been gutted all of these years about losing the blog entries/photos.

 

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5 hours ago, Matt Ashmore said:

 

I wonder if this is more to do with an agreement between agencies changing (i.e. Alamy are no longer acting as a distributor for some other agency/agencies) than individual contributors' images being removed.

 

 

Agree with Matt. Small agencies are being squeezed by big agencies to make their content exclusive to the big agency.

 

Alamy is not a big agency, so may be loosing some content from smaller partner agencies who are also with Mr BIG.

 

It would seem that there is a battle in the industry over exclusivity. It is a good thing for the industry and Alamy with it's unique content, because all agencies were beginning to look the same, due to non exclusivity.

 

Here is a introductory paragraph from the public section of Jim Pickerell's website.

"Sources tell me that XXXXXX is demanding that U.S. agencies with RM images in its collection make those RM images fully exclusive through XXXXXXX. Otherwise XXXXX will terminate the Agreement. One theory for doing this is that XXXXXX wants to be able to grant exclusive licenses through e-commerce sales. If XXXXXX knows they have total control of a given image, then they would be able to grant exclusive licenses without the need to do any checking with the parent agency that represents the image to see if exclusive rights are available. This would be similar to the arrangement that XXXXXXX has with its photographers."

 

The last XXXXXX in the quote does not refer to Alamy

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3 hours ago, MarkK said:

wow!! I am glad I wrote about having lost the site years ago as I was unable to locate the lost blog until now.  I haven't clicked on each of the entries but it looks like each are there, entries and photos, which I will I will be pulling and archiving which I couldn't do, according to the ex owners of the site, when they shut the site down out of the blue....THANK YOU!  I have been gutted all of these years about losing the blog entries/photos.

 

 

Glad I could restore some of that faith.. ;-)

 

wim

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