time line

[Gayle]

Once my photos are through QC and I have them tagged they said that they are for sale.  I did a search looking for them but they aren't coming up.  Is there a delay between tagging them and them showing up on the webpage?

[Niels Quist]

5 hours ago, Gayle said:

Once my photos are through QC and I have them tagged they said that they are for sale.  I did a search looking for them but they aren't coming up.  Is there a delay between tagging them and them showing up on the webpage?

 

Yes, they'll need a server update normally within the next 24 hours.

 

[Avpics]

On 15/08/2019 at 03:53, Gayle said:

..... I have them tagged.....

...but not very well. I had a look at some your images that might perhaps be used in tourist brochures but none gave their location. Have a rethink about what customers might be looking for in a much more physical sense, rather than 'rustic charm', 'peace' and 'zen'.

[Pete Snelling]

Some lovely images Gayle,

 

you may want to be descriptive within your captions. For example:

 

Its caption is "Fixer upper" Maybe changing to "Frontal view of a rusty Ford pickup truck" as I believe Alamy also take into account the caption when searches are perfromed.

[Joseph Clemson]

The caption is absolutely key to your images being discovered by buyers. It needs to be literal and descriptive. Add evocative and emotional words only if the image strongly conveys those things, Alamy is not a place for cute titles.

 

The keywords (tags) are equally important. Put in the things which are in the picture and leave out those things which are not in the picture. Again, emotions and moods should be included if the picture genuinely conveys them.

 

Your pictures have promise, but are unlikely ever to sell as you presently describe them. 

[Betty LaRue]

You have an image captioned “wooden cane chairs”.

You have tags, farm, bench, country, machine, machinery, mill, etc, yet I see no farm, no bench, no machine, no machinery, no mill.

What I see is wooden cane chairs hanging on a wooden fence.

Only tag, as others have said, what is in the picture.

Caption: Three wooden cane chairs handmade by the Amish displayed by hanging on a wood fence. USA.

tags,

handmade cane chair

handmade wooden cane chairs

cane chair

cane chairs

wood

wooden

fence

wood fence

Amish made chairs

Amish made chairs 

handmade cane chair

handmade cane chairs

hand made cane chair

hand made cane chairs

display

displayed

cane chair display

hanging 

hung up

town

state

US

USA

U.S.

U.S.A.

United States

North America

 

What will happen is someone will do a search for a subject that’s not in your picture and your cane chairs will come up. If they are searching for a farm, they expect to see a farmhouse, or a field of crops, or farm outbuildings, etc. Just because you took the picture on a farm doesn’t count. You must be able to see something that indicates a farm and those chairs don’t do that. Those chairs could be hanging on my side fence during the garage sale I’m going to have in the middle of my neighborhood for all a searcher knows!

 

When your image comes up in a search, that is called “a view”. A view is part of the formula Alamy uses to determine your rank. Your rank helps determine where your images will be seen in a search. Near the front? Middle? The last pages?

But since the buyer is looking for a farm or something else you’ve listed that’s not there, you will not get a zoom or a sale. This will cause your CTR (click through rate) to eventually plummet, causing your images to fall to the back end of those pages and never be seen. Even when the searcher is looking for “cane chairs”. If there are 50 pages of cane chair images, yours might be toward the back so far that the buyer will find what they want on the early pages and never see yours.

This is why everyone is cautioning you. The best of images won’t sell if they aren’t captioned and tagged properly.

Good luck. Better to fix them now before you have a few thousand in your port. It’s better to have 10 good relevant tags than 25 irrelevant ones tacked on.

Betty