QC Process

[SCPhotography20]

I'm new to Alamy, but I'm picking up on its all or nothing review process. How does that work? If a batch is approved, does that mean all of the photos have been reviewed, individually? Or does that mean Alamy chose a few random photos in the batch and approved everything based on the sample they reviewed?

[Betty LaRue]

QC checks a few and if they are ok, passes all.  In the past, a new contributor often had more, if not all checked for a while until QC felt confident the person knew what they were doing.

Not sure if that’s the case now. I know personally I didn’t know what I was doing for awhile and initially had a lot of failures. What got me was chromatic aberration, dust bunnies in the sky and soft and lacking definition. I had exposure and color balance ok. Once I enlarged each one to 100% for inspection, I spotted those things that got me in trouble.

I can’t remember my last failure now. Practice makes perfect. (Or they trust me....)

Betty

[M.Chapman]

34 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

QC checks a few and if they are ok, passes all.

 

Similarly, if one image fails QC, then all images in that batch (and any other batches you have waiting for QC) will be failed. You will be told the reason why the inspected image failed.

 

Mark

[SCPhotography20]

Oh interesting. So since I'm new, it's likely that all of the photos were individually reviewed, right?

[spacecadet]

19 hours ago, SCPhotography20 said:

Oh interesting. So since I'm new, it's likely that all of the photos were individually reviewed, right?

No.

Your initial submission of 3 were all inspected, but only a sample from your later submissions was.

[Betty LaRue]

I can only tell of my own experience. Years ago, my first handful of submissions had more failures than passes.  Whenever I inspected them all again, then removed the offending image, the rest passed. Most of the time I threw the whole submission away and resubmitted none.   My submissions were small...10 or so images at a time, but QC always found that one bad image which led me to believe they were all looked at, or otherwise the odds would not have been against me Every. Single. Time.
But that was years ago, when there were far fewer contributors for QC to handle and I’m not sure if brand new contributors are checked more rigorously these days. Probably not.  But if one starts off with a couple of failures, more images in a submission might be looked at.

I did not have the resources that is available today about stock. I tried, read everything I could find about it, but image inspection and what to look for was non-existent.  Alamy’s posting on the subject showed very obvious reasons for failure, but most of my “soft and lacking definition” failures were such judgement calls on what was too soft and what wasn’t. Back then, I was shooting with a 6 MP camera and the Alamy requirement was to upsize the images a lot. So an image taken today on a 6 MP camera, just sharp enough to pass QC, after upsizing, would fail, but since the upsizing is no longer required, it would pass.
Be happy you’re contributing today, but long for the prices of then.

Betty