John Richmond Posted October 16, 2019 Share Posted October 16, 2019 1 hour ago, John Mitchell said: My recent sales suggest the same thing for the most part -- specific/obscure subjects are doing the best. I don't think that the flood of images will ever stop. Alamy will just get increasingly bottom heavy with more an more images sinking into the depths of no return. Keeping one's leaky boat afloat is everything now. 🥴 I can only agree with you, John. Which means that any of us have to stand out to have any protection from the floodwaters. We all all have our own ideas how to do that. For what it's worth this is mine: I made a conscious decision when I first joined Alamy to seek out obscure subjects in my chosen areas (mostly plants, gardens and macro fauna and flora). My rationale was twofold. I knew from my own experience as a magazine article writer that editors do like material that references obscure subjects - and that requires suitable images captioned and keyworded with good subject knowledge. It was also obvious that the way to initially stand out, make those first vital sales and inch up the Alamy rankings was to contribute material that wasn't widely available. Once established, I could then start adding other material hoping that a higher ranking would make it more visible. It's worked for me. Doing a quick and dirty analysis of my zooms since October 2018 - 1007 in total over the year - 168 (16.68%) have come from searches which have returned less than 10 images, Extending that out just over half, 507 ( 50.3%) of the 1007, came from searches that yielded less than 100 results - 1 page at default settings. At better than 1 sale per four zooms that's yielding a fair few sales. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted October 16, 2019 Share Posted October 16, 2019 14 minutes ago, John Richmond said: I can only agree with you, John. Which means that any of us have to stand out to have any protection from the floodwaters. We all all have our own ideas how to do that. For what it's worth this is mine: I made a conscious decision when I first joined Alamy to seek out obscure subjects in my chosen areas (mostly plants, gardens and macro fauna and flora). My rationale was twofold. I knew from my own experience as a magazine article writer that editors do like material that references obscure subjects - and that requires suitable images captioned and keyworded with good subject knowledge. It was also obvious that the way to initially stand out, make those first vital sales and inch up the Alamy rankings was to contribute material that wasn't widely available. Once established, I could then start adding other material hoping that a higher ranking would make it more visible. It's worked for me. Doing a quick and dirty analysis of my zooms since October 2018 - 1007 in total over the year - 168 (16.68%) have come from searches which have returned less than 10 images, Extending that out just over half, 507 ( 50.3%) of the 1007, came from searches that yielded less than 100 results - 1 page at default settings. At better than 1 sale per four zooms that's yielding a fair few sales. I draw a lot from my experience in education and freelance writing (travel and culture mainly). Having these backgrounds has helped me a lot on Alamy. I think another way to stem the flood waters is to keep as many images as possible exclusive to Alamy. I've been noticing more multiple sales to the same clients lately, which could be (?) due to Alamy supplying buyers with selections of images available here only. Photo-buyers must be getting sick and tired of seeing the same images plastered across different agencies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reimar Posted October 16, 2019 Share Posted October 16, 2019 106,000 per day? Pshaw. SS gets about 250,000. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Panthera tigris Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 Interesting, then to stay relevant, or lets just say to stand still in terms of a percentage of the total collection an individual photographer would need to be increasing their overall collection size, at this moment in time, by 1.82% a month Or for every 1000 images in your collection you need to be adding 18 new images. a month. Not so difficult really as many seem to be adding a lot more. For me the big issue is what is the collection becoming in order that togs sustain themselves. On a collection of say 5000, then 5 x 18 is 90 new pics a month BUT theres a big difference between 90 pics and 90 good quality images. I think this is Alamy's main issue now, overall collection quality - their costs will go up year on year but their collection quality may not, leading to an inevitable conclusion - maybe. PS check my math as I often have "senior moments" 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 5 hours ago, Panthera tigris said: I think this is Alamy's main issue now, overall collection quality - their costs will go up year on year but their collection quality may not, leading to an inevitable conclusion - maybe. +1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geogphotos Posted October 17, 2019 Author Share Posted October 17, 2019 (edited) 9 hours ago, Reimar said: 106,000 per day? Pshaw. SS gets about 250,000. So something like 350,000- 500,000 new stock photos being created on a daily basis across all stock agencies/portals? *gulp* I'll be uploading about 20 later on..... Edited October 17, 2019 by geogphotos Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andremichel Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 1 hour ago, geogphotos said: So something like 350,000- 500,000 new stock photos being created on a daily basis across all stock agencies/portals? *gulp* I'll be uploading about 20 later on..... I suspect the majority of images are the same being uploaded across a multitude of libraries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 106,000 a day submitted to Alamy? While not a stock library - that's peanuts compared to Instagram. As of mid-2017: Total number of photos shared on Instagram: 34.7 billion Average number of photos uploaded each day to Instagram: 52 million With technology available to handle this quantity of images maybe we should be thankful it's only 106,000/day to Alamy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geogphotos Posted October 17, 2019 Author Share Posted October 17, 2019 40 minutes ago, Phil said: 106,000 a day submitted to Alamy? While not a stock library - that's peanuts compared to Instagram. As of mid-2017: Total number of photos shared on Instagram: 34.7 billion Average number of photos uploaded each day to Instagram: 52 million With technology available to handle this quantity of images maybe we should be thankful it's only 106,000/day to Alamy. That's very interesting and thought provoking. With so many billions of images sitting on hard discs around the globe, and with the current state of technology and storage, it would take a new entrant into the stock industry a very short time to match the number of images on Alamy and SS combined. Using the Instagram numbers you could have a new entrant rivalling Alamy for numbers within just one week! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 6 minutes ago, geogphotos said: Using the Instagram numbers you could have a new entrant rivalling Alamy for numbers within just one week! Yep - consider if Mr Zuckerberg (Facebook's CEO - Instagram owned by FB) woke up one morning and decided over coffee to leverage Instagram's monstrous image accumulation and daily inflow (assuming they are archived) into a stock library. Game changer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry Harrison Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 A new 'social media' sourced library might be able to get the numbers but it's not much use if nobody can find what they want. There is a relatively new entrant offering free images and they use AI tagging but although you do certainly get related images coming up it's very hit and miss (thankfully), not a good experience at all in my opinion. Certainly even if you find an image that you like there's virtually no accompanying information to draw on or provide context. Presumably Alamy are using some kind of AI for their new 'Similar' images' search tool and I've read that other libraries use AI to suggest keywords on upload that you can choose to accept or ignore, that could be quite useful. An AI assisted search would be good also, Google Image Search is pretty sophisticated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 1 hour ago, Harry Harrison said: A new 'social media' sourced library might be able to get the numbers but it's not much use if nobody can find what they want. There is a relatively new entrant offering free images and they use AI tagging but although you do certainly get related images coming up it's very hit and miss (thankfully), not a good experience at all in my opinion. Certainly even if you find an image that you like there's virtually no accompanying information to draw on or provide context. Presumably Alamy are using some kind of AI for their new 'Similar' images' search tool and I've read that other libraries use AI to suggest keywords on upload that you can choose to accept or ignore, that could be quite useful. An AI assisted search would be good also, Google Image Search is pretty sophisticated. Some stock photo agencies have ineffective keywording as well. I have experience with a big stock photo agency similar to Alamy that keywords your images for you, and they do a terrible job. My guess is that they aren't the only agency with lackadaisical tagging. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chuck Nacke Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 I feel the need to say, again my opinion, that Alamy appears to be doing fine and like Joseph, I am happy to see those poorly processed and keyworded images competing with my images. I would like nothing more then to see Alamy become the major worldwide source for images for publication and broadcast. I must add that I often see images uploaded to Alamy and think, WHY? As I have written before, "It is up to the contributors to select or edit the images they upload." Some of these "agencies" that just pickup news photos and pass them through to Alamy are part of the problem. Chuck 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Blinking Eye Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 What's even more mindboggling is that there remains an infinite variety of the things to see newly, and original frames to take, in this complex ever-moving universe. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reimar Posted October 17, 2019 Share Posted October 17, 2019 On 16/10/2019 at 17:53, Reimar said: 106,000 per day? Pshaw. SS gets about 250,000. Hey, no need to red arrow the messenger. That was tongue in cheek 😋 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geogphotos Posted October 18, 2019 Author Share Posted October 18, 2019 10 hours ago, Reimar said: Hey, no need to red arrow the messenger. That was tongue in cheek 😋 Surprised to see some of mine on SS through distributor - in Editorial at proper prices, these are RM images Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allan Bell Posted October 18, 2019 Share Posted October 18, 2019 Makes my 4 or 5 a day seem a bit insignificant.😔 Allan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geogphotos Posted October 18, 2019 Author Share Posted October 18, 2019 On 16/10/2019 at 22:53, Reimar said: 106,000 per day? Pshaw. SS gets about 250,000. From the website: Over 300,672,731 royalty-free images with 1,395,156 new stock images added weekly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted October 18, 2019 Share Posted October 18, 2019 5 hours ago, geogphotos said: From the website: Over 300,672,731 royalty-free images with 1,395,156 new stock images added weekly. Hmmm... let's see ... if my math is correct that's over 138 IPM (Images Per Minute). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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