Live News - Adding Additional Photos, Best Practice?

[DylanP]

Hi all,

 

I’m new to Alamy so apologies if this is a noob question. I did search the forum but could not find a similar topic to my question.

 

This weekend I will be covering a major event and submitting to Alamy for the first time. As this event will span the whole day and is a live news event, I’d prefer to get photos up ASAP (within an hour of taking them). 

 

The question I have is: I plan to upload batches of photos every few hours during the same day for what is technically the same event (major news story). Should I be changing my IPTC headline for each new “batch” so that it appears as a separate album on the live news feed, or just add it to the existing album via the same tags? What will give my photos the best chance of selling in that regard? Do newsdesks keep checking older galleries for new photos throughout the day/will any new photos being added to the same gallery “bump” it to the front?

 

Again, apologies if this is a stupid question. Just want to make sure that I am following best practice for getting my photos in front of the right people at the right time.

 

Thanks!

[DylanP]

5 hours ago, LawrensonPhoto said:

If you upload say 15 images at 9am and then don't upload any more images for a couple of hours* and then start uploading again they will be treated as a separate upload

*Others who have been doing it far longer than me can maybe tell you how long exactly.

But alamy might batch them together for you as well if they spot them

Brilliant, thanks for the tip. I’ll experiment and see what works.

[Starsphinx]

I have no experience in this - but if I was in the situation of needing to do it I think I would try to arrange it so that although the groups were treated as separate loads they would clearly link to each other - so the new load would go on the top of the page but indicate there were others that could then be searched for.

Something like  having the headline as "event such and such place here first group" on the first lot then with subsequent uploads "event such and such place here update 1" then update 2 then 3 etc and then with the last upload "event such and such place here final update"

This should make it easy for editors to see that there are other images for them to use while not interfering with Alamy putting them in separate groups

[Matt Ashmore]

On 21/03/2019 at 11:33, DylanP said:

This weekend I will be covering a major event and submitting to Alamy for the first time.

 

Was it a certain march in London by chance? 🙂

[sb photos]

5 hours ago, Matt Ashmore said:

 

Was it a certain march in London by chance? 🙂

 

If it was I was shooting it too, but left early as I was committed to an airport run to pick up my wife. It was saturated with photographers, photo journalists and videographers. With very large events plans often have to be modified, the crowds inhibit movement and tube stations can be closed or exit only. My pet hate that can stop regular uploads is the 4G networks being saturated, and not being able to upload, as happened to me yesterday.

[sb photos]

On 21/03/2019 at 11:33, DylanP said:

<snip> This weekend I will be covering a major event and submitting to Alamy for the first time. As this event will span the whole day and is a live news event, I’d prefer to get photos up ASAP (within an hour of taking them). 

 

I forgot to ask earlier, how did it go?

[Colblimp]

Great to see you on here, Dylan!  Just upload with the same headline and Alamy will either batch them together or treat them as new.  Either way they'll be up there and for sale.

[DylanP]

On 24/03/2019 at 00:01, Matt Ashmore said:

 

Was it a certain march in London by chance? 🙂

 

18 hours ago, sb photos said:

 

I forgot to ask earlier, how did it go?

 

Indeed it was (planned at least). A family memeber had to go into hospital so I gave it a miss. Not gonna lie though, I used it as an opportunity to get lots of stock photos of ambulances, inside of a new, clean hospital etc and more. 

 

On 24/03/2019 at 05:52, sb photos said:

My pet hate that can stop regular uploads is the 4G networks being saturated, and not being able to upload, as happened to me yesterday.

 

Same hate from me, although I have a spreadsheet that I keep places with good WiFi on for these events. 4G is usually un-usable, especially with all these small news networks that use combined 4G to do live online streams, just eating up all our bandwidth!

 

I do tend to find that most McDonald’s, Wetherspoons and some Starbucks tend to hold up OK during these massive events. Surprisingly the Virgin WiFi in the tube seems to fair well with me too, though it’s a bit awkward sitting on a platform uploading hundreds of photos.

 

17 hours ago, Colblimp said:

Great to see you on here, Dylan!  Just upload with the same headline and Alamy will either batch them together or treat them as new.  Either way they'll be up there and for sale.

Thanks, glad to be here!

[Matt Ashmore]

3 hours ago, DylanP said:

Indeed it was (planned at least). A family memeber had to go into hospital so I gave it a miss. Not gonna lie though, I used it as an opportunity to get lots of stock photos of ambulances, inside of a new, clean hospital etc and more. 

 

i wonder if you might even be better off (from a stock photo perspective) having taken the ambulance/hospital pictures. I suspect there were just so many photographers trying to cover the march that chances of selling an image as live news could have been fairly slim. But pictures of ambulances and a hospital potentially stand the test of time... a bit more ageless so could sell in the long run.

 

Hope your family member is OK.

 

[Avpics]

11 hours ago, Matt Ashmore said:

 

i wonder if you might even be better off having taken the ambulance/hospital pictures. I suspect there were just so many photographers trying to cover the march that chances of selling an image as live news could have been fairly slim...

 

I had success with an image taken locally in the morning before joining the masses on the march (probably without publication), so yes, you've more chance not following the crowd. As for the uploads during the day, I sent four batches of images all with the same heading. After each upload the batch will move to the latest, newest, position on the page. I have sometimes at past events changed the details to save what I thought might be confusion but Alamy have altered them back into the same batch.

[DylanP]

On 25/03/2019 at 10:40, Matt Ashmore said:

 

i wonder if you might even be better off (from a stock photo perspective) having taken the ambulance/hospital pictures. I suspect there were just so many photographers trying to cover the march that chances of selling an image as live news could have been fairly slim. But pictures of ambulances and a hospital potentially stand the test of time... a bit more ageless so could sell in the long run.

 

Hope your family member is OK.

 

 

I think so too, I was checking the feed all day and to be honest, most of the photos I saw were things that I would have gotten too, bar a couple "chance" shots that were all about the subject, lucky time and place I guess.

 

On 25/03/2019 at 22:41, Avpics said:

I had success with an image taken locally in the morning before joining the masses on the march (probably without publication), so yes, you've more chance not following the crowd. As for the uploads during the day, I sent four batches of images all with the same heading. After each upload the batch will move to the latest, newest, position on the page. I have sometimes at past events changed the details to save what I thought might be confusion but Alamy have altered them back into the same batch.

 

Nice one, pretty much answers the question - Thanks! :)