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Advice re old live news would be appreciated


Eden

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Hello all,

I would very much appreciate it if you could advise me

I previously had access to the live news feed and have images which are now stock.

Should I remove most of these or if not, should I re-caption them. They are occasionally used in newspapers but after the event

Many thanks,

Eden

https://www.alamy.com/portfolio/edenbreitz/livenews.html

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Don't delete - at least not for that reason. Most, if not all, of my earlier news images also only sold, and sell,  as stock.

 

About the re-captioning many here advise to do that. I don't do it a lot, only occasionally - or if I feel like it. Don't take it as an unnecessary burden. It may give some false views - but what counts to me - and ranking-wise, I think - are sales.

 

Niels

Edited by Niels Quist
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36 minutes ago, Niels Quist said:

Don't delete - at least not for that reason. Most, if not all, of my earlier news images also only sold, and sell,  as stock.

 

About the re-captioning many here advise to do that. I don't do it a lot, only occasionally - or if I feel like it. Don't take it as an unnecessary burden. It may give some false views - but what counts to me - and ranking-wise, I think - are sales.

 

Niels

Thanks for this advice, Niels

It did seem like a lot of extra work!

Eden

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Re-captioning and optimising the supertags may be helpful in re-focussing on the subject of the image. I posted a live news image of a hospital caught up in a controversy about high rates of septicaemia. The images didn't sell then, but have sold as stock a few times after  I refocussed the captions and keywords away from septicaemia to general hospital imagery. Much depends of on the nature of the image, but the extra work may well be rewarded.

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16 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

Re-captioning and optimising the supertags may be helpful in re-focussing on the subject of the image. I posted a live news image of a hospital caught up in a controversy about high rates of septicaemia. The images didn't sell then, but have sold as stock a few times after  I refocussed the captions and keywords away from septicaemia to general hospital imagery. Much depends of on the nature of the image, but the extra work may well be rewarded.

Thanks, Joseph.

Will at some point have to go through them and decide which may be worth the effort.

 

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4 hours ago, Joseph Clemson said:

Re-captioning and optimising the supertags may be helpful in re-focussing on the subject of the image...

That ^. Sales are hard enough to come by without doing everything you can to align things in your favour. If nothing else remove any words that don't directly apply to that particular image

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Re my news now stock images, they have been selling as they are. I doubt I'll ever have have time to consider changing any captions or tags. If I do I will only revisit specific images, all wouldn't be practicable.

Edited by sb photos
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I usually re-caption and re-keyword my live news images ("soft news" events in my case)  a couple of months after the fact. It has been very worthwhile as I've had some good sales later on, $$$ in a few cases. I think the trick is to re-slant the tags and captions as much as possible for general stock.

Edited by John Mitchell
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9 hours ago, sb photos said:

Re my news now stock images, they have been selling as they are. I doubt I'll ever have have time to consider changing any captions or tags. If I do I will only revisit specific images, all wouldn't be practicable.

many thanks!

 

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9 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

I usually re-caption and re-keyword my live news images ("soft news" events in my case)  a couple of months after the fact. It has been very worthwhile as I've had some good sales later on, $$$ in a few cases. I think the trick is to re-slant the tags and captions as much as possible for general stock.

The advice is appreciated!

I have just had a look at the first page of my live news portfolio and see that some may be worth re-visiting and re-captioning while others would probably not be worth the effort.

So I guess all the opinions have validity,

Best wishes

Eden

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15 hours ago, Avpics said:

That ^. Sales are hard enough to come by without doing everything you can to align things in your favour. If nothing else remove any words that don't directly apply to that particular image

Good advice,Thanks

Edited by Eden
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I had been wondering about that myself before my fledgling career as an Alamy News photographer was so tragically cut short (insert smiley here).

 

It seems from the advice above that it isn't necessary to do so though it can be of benefit, images may still sell after the event. Given that News pictures don't have tags at all I was surprised  that they don't need any to help them along as stock but perhaps the fact that they can have much longer 600 character captions gets around this to an extent.

 

I wondered also whether it is worth visiting the 'optional' fields in AIM as well as keywords and captions, so Location and Categories in particular I suppose, the latter usually but not necessarily 'News & Reportage'.

Edited by Harry Harrison
typo
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15 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

I had been wondering about that myself before my fledgling career as an Alamy News photographer was so tragically cut short (insert smiley here).

 

It seems from the advice above that it isn't necessary to do so though it can be of benefit, images may still sell after the event. Given that News pictures don't have tags at all I was surprised  that they don't need any to help them along as stock but perhaps the fact that they can have much longer 600 character captions gets around this to an extent.

 

I wondered also whether it is worth visiting the 'optional' fields in AIM as well as keywords and captions, so Location and Categories in particular I suppose, the latter usually but not necessarily 'News & Reportage'.

 

As far as I am aware, News pictures do have tags and all the other information that normal stock photos carry and they can be edited in AIM as soon as they are processed. Where time and circumstances have permitted I have fine-tuned my captions and added relevant keywords soon after uploading. It may not make much  difference in the live news stream, but it does when the image goes into normal stock.

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30 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

It seems from the advice above that it isn't necessary to do so though it can be of benefit, images may still sell after the event. Given that News pictures don't have tags at all I was surprised  that they don't need any to help them along as stock but perhaps the fact that they can have much longer 600 character captions gets around this to an extent.

 

I wondered also whether it is worth visiting the 'optional' fields in AIM as well as keywords and captions, so Location and Categories in particular I suppose, the latter usually but not necessarily 'News & Reportage'.

 

Of course, they should be tagged as usual. Whenever my news images came live as news images I tagged them as usual to be prepared for their later life. otherwise they won't sell, of course.

 

And yes, the optional field is very necessary. The ticking of people, property and releases is very important, then in many cases you can remove the "editorial" annotation automatically added by the news function, when they have left the news section, unless contains stuff that should be editorial only. I also filled in the location now I was there. I use the past tense as I too am not a news supplier any longer.

 

Edited: Joseph beat me to it 😉

 

Niels

Edited by Niels Quist
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5 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

As far as I am aware, News pictures do have tags

Sorry, I meant that they don't have tags when they are uploaded, just the IPTC headline and description fields, they can certainly be added after the event 

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38 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

...I didn't try adding tags to the IPTC Keywords field before I uploaded the News images, maybe they would have seen it through into the AIM. I was too paranoid about following the Alamy instructions to the letter!

 

As I don't have Live News access any longer I can't test this, but I am almost certain that IPTC keywords upload correctly with the rest of the metadata.

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14 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

 

As I don't have Live News access any longer I can't test this, but I am almost certain that IPTC keywords upload correctly with the rest of the metadata.

yes, I too can no longer test it

But my IPTC keywords did load correctly with the data when I was able to submit live news.

Was not aware that one was not supposed to tag the pics.

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Anyway, thanks again everyone for help & advice.

I am a bit sad that I can no longer submit live news as Berlin is a hive of activity...demos, protests, art and politics

c'est la vie ;-)

 

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8 minutes ago, Eden said:

Was not aware that one was not supposed to tag the pics.

 

No, they don't say that you're not supposed to, as far as I am aware they don't mention tags at all in the pdf  instructions for uploading to News so I didn't want to risk causing any problems. I can't test it now either but I didn't think I could access my Live News pictures on AIM in order to add tags for quite some time though looking at some Live News pictures at random now I see that they have tags. Interesting to know that you can add them to the IPTC though. Looking back in fact I think that they won't go live as stock without the usual minimum five tags but  I can't quite remember if that is true or not as I just entered everything as normal as soon as I could.

 

 

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I have resubmitted a few of my pictures through the stock route. They were good enough to risk QC inspection. When these submissions go  live they were for sale without the live news caveat that they may contain imperfections, this thing:-

 

"More information: 
This image could have imperfections as it’s either historical or reportage."

 

James

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19 minutes ago, Mr Standfast said:

I have resubmitted a few of my pictures through the stock route

 

Interesting, do you mean that the original News pictures were still up there or that you never allowed them to go on into stock? I think that caveat is there automatically if the 'Image Type' is News Image. It seems that you can change the image type but I don't know what you would have to do in order to change it, I can't seem to change it on any of mine, would they then lose the caveat without going through QC?

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