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Hey all,

it's about a year ago that I made my first submission to Alamy. With over 6000 photos online and with only  a few sales yet I'm thinking about improving keywords and captions. Do you have any ideas what I can do better, should avoid or what mistakes I should definitely correct? Please note that I have already read the guides on keywording on Alamy.
Or do I just need more patience?

 

Cheers,
Caspar

 

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2 hours ago, Caspar Schlageter said:

Hey all,

it's about a year ago that I made my first submission to Alamy. With over 6000 photos online and with only  a few sales yet I'm thinking about improving keywords and captions. Do you have any ideas what I can do better, should avoid or what mistakes I should definitely correct? Please note that I have already read the guides on keywording on Alamy.
Or do I just need more patience?

 

Cheers,
Caspar

 

Try searching on this forum as there are lots of useful threads and advice. A very cursory look and I suggest removing any year dates eg 2017 unless the image is an archive one, as well as keywords relating to your camera. Also repeat All of the information in your caption in your keywords, eg for one of your bird pictures you haven’t got Australia in the keywords, and for Roadhouse you haven’t got that name in keywords. It’s as much about what NOT to put in as well as what you should put in, IMHO. As time has gone on I have used fewer and fewer keywords. 

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I’d say your tags and captions need work. A few things I noticed… NT should also be spelled out in full as a tag: Northern Territory (round here it means ‘National Trust’!). Your image PPAR27 has ‘a woman wearing a dress and a hut’ (that made me laugh… but won’t help sales). I saw quite a few spelling mistakes.

 

Shots of a Hebridean ferry don’t have ‘ferry’ in the tags, and ‘Western Isles’ is in common use, as well as ‘Outer Hebrides’. Your ‘thatched roof of blackhouse’ is a pile of cut peat! For an isolated house in the Scottish highlands, tags could include ‘remote’, isolated’, ‘solitude’, ‘secluded’, ‘off-grid’, ‘rural’, ‘croft’, ‘subsistence farming’, ‘agriculture’, etc. For a street in Portree, Isle of sky, you have ‘river’, ‘landscape’, ‘mountain’… which don’t appear in the pic.

 

Some pix appear rather dark… either because the light is gloomy or because the shadows are blocked up. You might usefully cull some of the less effective images...

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You have some great pictures there. I don't know if it's just me, but a lot of them look a little dark. It might just be my personal taste thing but I would probably push exposure up in post-processing by half a stop to a stop on many of them and open ups shadows a little more.

 

I think the other issue you have is that you have lots and lots and lots of stunning landscapes. But unfortunately, these don't sell amazingly well on Alamy and you have huge competition. It's worth noting that Alamy is a UK based agency and primarily (probably about 60) of it's buyer base is based in The UK. Alamy also tends to be more known for selling editorial images. So an image of a child putting some rubbish in a bin or people sheltering from the rain under an umbrella potentially  have more chance of selling that a beautiful landscape in Australia. Not to say that beautiful landscapes of Australia do not sell.. they are used in things like travel brosures.. but sometimes more mundane subjects, particularly if they include people doing something just seem to do better.

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PP669N, for instance, says it is a rest area. I see roads going through hills, but no rest area. It’s possible you shot this from a rest area, but that doesn’t count. The only thing that counts is what the image shows.

Dont even say in the caption, “image shot from a rest area in *****. The fact that “rest area” is in the caption is searchable and will give you false hits. 

Some, not all, of your blues are muddy. If I can find a true white, gray or black, I can use the white balance dropper in LR or PS.  If there’s nothing to click on, sometimes tweaking the slider toward cooler or warmer helps. Give Auto s chance also.  It will greatly help your skies and color balance. And like others, I agree quite a few are too dark.

Are you shooting RAW? Correcting images work ever so much better in RAW.

 Betty

 

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Just to echo what Betty said, your images do tend to look a bit murky (on my monitor at least). Perhaps your monitor hasn't been calibrated. I found that it made a big difference when I finally bought some software and calibrated my display properly. Mind you, a lot of my older, darker images do continue to do surprisingly well. Something else I'd suggest is adding more conceptual keywords to your images. Doing so might open up additional licensing possibilities.

 

P.S. Something else I discovered is that I'm naturally drawn to warm colours, so I often increased the colour temperature too much on my images. Now I do my best to resist the urge.

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What they all said, I did chuckle at he lady wearing a hut! 

 

Easy done however, I always check my captions and keywords a little while after keywording and almost always find errors or, more particularly, omissions. It's impossible to over emphasise the importance of comprehensive and accurate keywording.

 

I copied one of your shots into Photoshop and the histogram was skewed way to the left i.e. most of the tones are dark. OK for some subjects you might want that effect, but for most purposes bright and cheerful sells. You don't essentially need a calibrated monitor, but if you don't have one you do need to rely on the histogram while processing.

 

 

 

 

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Thank you all for your feedback.
I have to admit that editing and keywording 6000 photos in around 2 months wasn't the best idea. I'll try to correct my errors by checking each of my photos, remove and add some keywords, etc. Some of them are indeed too dark, hence I'll edit and upload them again.

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On 10/06/2019 at 11:33, Sally said:

Try searching on this forum as there are lots of useful threads and advice. A very cursory look and I suggest removing any year dates eg 2017.......

 

It’s wise though to fill in the optional field with the date the image was taken. Otherwise a search by subject plus date won’t include any of your images.

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41 minutes ago, Thyrsis said:

 

It’s wise though to fill in the optional field with the date the image was taken. Otherwise a search by subject plus date won’t include any of your images.

That would happen automatically except in the case of archive images, wouldn’t it?

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7 minutes ago, Sally said:

That would happen automatically except in the case of archive images, wouldn’t it?

 

Not necessarily.  

 

From the Alamy Image Manager instruction manual:

”Date taken
3. If this information has not been automatically included, you can enter or amend it using this field”

 

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6,000 photos in one year, I'm impressed. After you make your first sale it will become easier. One way to improve captions and keyboarding is try to find your own photos from Alamy's web site. Then fill in the blanks. 

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