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Alamy End of Year video


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1 hour ago, geogphotos said:

I don't really see the need to be posting comments about how much we appreciate Alamy. It is self-evident that we wouldn't be here if that wasn't the case. But going on from that basis it is perfectly legitimate for contributors to raise problems, make comments even if not always totally positive, make suggestions, express disappointment, take the Mickey a little, have a laugh, and so on. 

 

Of course it is difficult when everybody is at home trying to make a really great video - and personally I don't care less about the production quality etc. I could hear what was being said - it seemed more a case of what was being read out actually - and it is always interesting to hear from Alamy. But since there was a preparatory  thread on what contributors wanted covered, and that received lots of comments and suggestions, I think it is fair to say purely and simply that the presentation was short on detail.

 

And not all of this lack of detail is about the future, there is a lot of uncertainty about the current system and operation that could and should be clarified, it was asked for, but didn't happen. The information given was fairly general and non-specific. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate Alamy and think it is the best thing since sliced bread. 

 

Maybe there were so many questions about everything that it was not possible to figure out what was going to happen with a lot of them that they decided to go with what they had by the time of making the video so that we at least had something going forward into the holiday period. This would give the contributors some idea what was happening with some of the changes that they have in the pipeline and give them breathing space to continue with the answers to the majority of the contributors queries and suggestions. At that time we hope there will be a more explicit video covering a wider range.

 

Just my thoughts.

 

Allan

 

 

 

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1 minute ago, John Morrison said:

 

Steady on...

 

Why not a "Start of Year" video near the end of January.

 

Allan

 

Hell it is getting difficult to see the keyboard. Better put the light on.

 

ITMA

 

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Just now, Allan Bell said:

 

Why not a "Start of Year" video near the end of January.

 

Allan

 

Hell it is getting difficult to see the keyboard. Better put the light on.

 

ITMA

 

 

CLICK!  THAT's better.

 

Me again.

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Despite the not best realized video (composition, audio, background sounds, etc.), I appreciate Alamy’s effort. I understand it has hard to get down to details in every questions arrised in the open post for it. Maybe regular videos of particular issues could be done in the future. Contributors would appreciate it a lot, for sure!

Some good news to hear: infringements team (that is essential!), looking for costumers outside UK, better costumers experience with the search page and the video.
Bad news: the possibility of commiting clients by susbcription schemes. Very disturbing.

Thank you Alamy. Hope next year will be better for all of us.
Merry Christmas!

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5 minutes ago, shearwater said:

Despite the not best realized video (composition, audio, background sounds, etc.), I appreciate Alamy’s effort. I understand it has hard to get down to details in every questions arrised in the open post for it. Maybe regular videos of particular issues could be done in the future. Contributors would appreciate it a lot, for sure!

Some good news to hear: infringements team (that is essential!), looking for costumers outside UK, better costumers experience with the search page and the video.
Bad news: the possibility of commiting clients by susbcription schemes. Very disturbing.

Thank you Alamy. Hope next year will be better for all of us.
Merry Christmas!

 

bad news for me is that they use quantity as a key indicator.   always thought Alamy was about quality. 

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5 minutes ago, meanderingemu said:

 

bad news for me is that they use quantity as a key indicator.   always thought Alamy was about quality. 

Sure it is too. I would prefer 100 good ones...than 300 not so good, duplicated and/or badly keyworded. Clients experience and response should improve a lot.

Quality please...good clients would pay happily more for it!

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4 hours ago, geogphotos said:

It is good news about chasing infringements. Unreported legitimate uses is also a big problem - where the client or distributor just doesn't report the sale but Alamy has a download record/knows about it. It shouldn't be necessary for the contributor to track these down and report them six months or more after publication. And how many do we miss and they never get reported and paid?

 

My current example is a online magazine in Spain in April which I found, reported to Alamy who told me they would seek payment, and as yet nothing. Part of the problem is that the actual value of these sales is so low that chasing them is a disproportionate expense. I only know about it because somebody kindly reported it on the forum.

I share your comments and feelings, Ian. Specifically with distributors delaying, misreporting or even not reporting sales. As you can see in “Have you found…” post I have been tracking Alamy’s images uses in some spanish online media clients almost all this year. 
I have found that (in my case) sales are not reported within the four months awaiting period, some were misreported, etc…and had to warn Alamy about it. And all that we missed…
Hope the infrigements team wiil deal with all this issues promptly and fast because, as you say, Alamy knows when a distributor has made a download.
As your example, I0m still waiting for one german distributor (book published in may) and three spanish distributor uses (from june, and july). Next week expires the 4 month period for reporting another spanish use. What if I didn’t report to Alamy?

 

By the way…you have got another spanish (sorry) use reported in the forum ;)

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3 hours ago, Chuck Nacke said:

Happy Holidays to you as well Ed,

 

I agree with "I trust Alamy based on how they've treated me in the past."  

 

Both of us have worked with more than a few agencies, libraries etc. in the

past.  I just ended a 30+ year relationship with a group that you know well, but

I'm still with Alamy.

 

Chuck

We already KNOW that, Chuck.

As I said it a few times before,  your posts are ALWAYS about ME, ME, ME, ME, ME (and I mean YOU YOU YOU )

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5 hours ago, geogphotos said:

It is good news about chasing infringements. Unreported legitimate uses is also a big problem - where the client or distributor just doesn't report the sale but Alamy has a download record/knows about it. It shouldn't be necessary for the contributor to track these down and report them six months or more after publication. And how many do we miss and they never get reported and paid?

It would help if Alamy told us which images had been downloaded, then we could focus our search activities. (Although, with an automated reverse image search tool, it might not be too hard for Alamy to do this).

 

Mark

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I read the first page of comments here before watching the video and was happily surprised and encouraged when I watched it. Thanks Alamy!

 

They covered a lot of the questions asked and seem to be focused on two very important concerns, image size and infringements. I was also pleased to know that PA Media photographers aren't getting a leg up on the rest of us.  

 

It also sounds like they've grown their business in this nightmare year. Unfortunately, with ever more photographers, our share of the pie as contributors is likely to keep shrinking,  a problem with any crowdsourced model. It's why stock contributors seem to hit a plateau even as agencies continue to grow their business. The only way around this is to shoot better than average photos and keyword well but even that may not be enough since even a large portfolio becomes an ever smaller percentage of a mind-bogglingly large pie. Did Emily say 45 million more images were added this year? Even as demand grows, it's not growing that fast. I hope their marketing can grab a greater share of that demand.

 

I'm encouraged about things that will help individual contributors get more, such as size limits to prevent people paying for presentation sales when they are using a full size image for something else and following up on infringements, are in the works. I wasn't expecting them to reinvent the wheel and what I heard all seemed positive, actually better than I expected. 

 

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you all. Let's look forward to a much better 2021. 

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2 minutes ago, Marianne said:

I read the first page of comments here before watching the video and was happily surprised and encouraged when I watched it. Thanks Alamy!

 

They covered a lot of the questions asked and seem to be focused on two very important concerns, image size and infringements. I was also pleased to know that PA Media photographers aren't getting a leg up on the rest of us.  

 

It also sounds like they've grown their business in this nightmare year. Unfortunately, with ever more photographers, our share of the pie as contributors is likely to keep shrinking,  a problem with any crowdsourced model. It's why stock contributors seem to hit a plateau even as agencies continue to grow their business. The only way around this is to shoot better than average photos and keyword well but even that may not be enough since even a large portfolio becomes an ever smaller percentage of a mind-bogglingly large pie. Did Emily say 45 million more images were added this year? Even as demand grows, it's not growing that fast. I hope their marketing can grab a greater share of that demand.

 

I'm encouraged about things that will help individual contributors get more, such as size limits to prevent people paying for presentation sales when they are using a full size image for something else and following up on infringements, are in the works. I wasn't expecting them to reinvent the wheel and what I heard all seemed positive, actually better than I expected. 

 

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you all. Let's look forward to a much better 2021. 

 

 

not disagreeing, but image growth probably had little to do with Alamy, I know the action of a certain MS agency pushed people to upload here, without even consideration if it was a good fit.  I would be happier if they announced the images had gone down because they removed images that didn't meet market needs.  I for one would be happy to remove one of my image if they told me it had been viewed 500 times without a zoom nor a sale. 

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1 hour ago, Olivier Parent said:

Growth…

 

More images…

OK, so what?

Does any client really need more than 105 000 images of the Eiffel tower?

Do we really think a client will search through almost 2 millions of images of "heart" to get the right one?

 

More clients…

OK, so what?

As far as I can see, even with almost twice as many sales as in 2015, my revenue remains lower due to the fact that my average price per sale has lowered by more than 50% in only 5 years… Not even wanting to think about the prices when I started selling pictures here in 2008, with an average price per sale 5 times higher than this year. My last 3 digits sale was in early April, not a single one since then.

 

So OK, the collection is growing, as is the number of clients… Good news everybody.

 

You're spot on with most of your points, Olivier. But can we really blame Alamy for low prices in digital stock?

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3 hours ago, M.Chapman said:

It would help if Alamy told us which images had been downloaded, then we could focus our search activities. (Although, with an automated reverse image search tool, it might not be too hard for Alamy to do this).

 

Mark

It doesn't help that many uses are in physical formats and therefore unsearchable, other than through subscription sites like Pressreader... Online usage tends to be behind paywalls which search engines can't index.

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22 hours ago, Shergar said:

I understood exactly what you meant Regis.

 

David Bailey is a English photographer who has dyspraxia. ... made to feel stupid due to his clumsiness and his problems with spelling and writing.

Thank you Shergar.

I didn't know that David Bailey has dyspraxia.

I have loved his work since I came across it in the early 80s, and he was already a very famous photographer by then, with an already great career.

 

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13 minutes ago, Olivier Parent said:

 

I do not blame Alamy in any way. I would have liked another perspective than just an ever growing collection with ever lowering prices, that's all.

 

I don't blame Alamy either. They are doing their best in a very tough environment. There are many factors that have caused the drop in prices. However, I agree that it would be nice to hear some discussion around this topic by the Alamy sales team. Hopefully that will happen at some point. 

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7 hours ago, meanderingemu said:

bad news for me is that they use quantity as a key indicator.   always thought Alamy was about quality. 

 

If someone is searching for guppy fry, the next best thing isn't a perfect photo of a happy family having a picnic.

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6 hours ago, Ognyan Yosifov said:

We already KNOW that, Chuck.

As I said it a few times before,  your posts are ALWAYS about ME, ME, ME, ME, ME (and I mean YOU YOU YOU )

You are not very bright (just my opinion) and I am offended by your post.

 

If you could read in English and had an IQ above your shoe size, I assume that you

have very small feet and hands... you would understand that the reason that I write

about me is because I do not speak for all and only from my own experience.

 

P.S. the first and second sentences above are about YOU YOU YOU.

 

Chuck

 

 

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1 hour ago, Olivier Parent said:

 

I do not blame Alamy in any way. I would have liked another perspective than just an ever growing collection with ever lowering prices, that's all.

My odd ball rare things that didn't have a thousand to 40,000 other examples in Alamy's stock brought more than anything else.   Rarer, the more money.

 

The rare things may not be searched often, but when someone is looking for precisely one thing, having it available doesn't lower prices if Alamy has it and other agencies don't.

 

And I've never licensed a picture of a cat.

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20 hours ago, RyanU said:

It doesn't help that many uses are in physical formats and therefore unsearchable, other than through subscription sites like Pressreader... Online usage tends to be behind paywalls which search engines can't index.

 

Indeed, but Google books reveals some physical uses, and there are other infringment services that can look behind paywalls. (e.g. ImageRights, Pixsy and Copytrack). It would be helpful to know where searches should be focussed. At the moment my searches are confined to finding usages of sold images (largely to support my DACS claims). I used to search for zoomed images usage, but that was largely a waste of time. But, if I also knew which images had been downloaded, it would be useful.

 

Mark

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2 hours ago, Olivier Parent said:

 

Another thing to consider is that the lower the prices, the more we will get unreported sales, and also refund requests while the images have been used.

The lower the perceived value of something, the less people care about it and the less they care about just "stealing" it.

Basically, when someone can find thousands of reasonably well-photographed examples on Flickr or wherever else, and find a photographer on that site or similar sites that will give away a photo, then how is someone going to sell yet another well-photographed example for any kind of money? 

 

I do feel for the people who did amazing shots and found them constantly being posted without credit to social media.  

 

In the past, casual book piracy wasn't worth it unless the book was a best seller ("Gone with the Wind" was pirated world-wide and Margaret Mitchell chased them down).  Casual photography piracy was going to be either a photograph of a photograph, or some dark room worker printing out some special items to sell on the side.  

 

Now we have technology that makes copying a book relatively easy (scan and run optical character recognition programming on the scan), then maybe edit a bit) and distribution dead easy (distribute files in a couple of different formats -- and the program for doing that is easily downloaded).

 

So, it's more complicated than "If only we charged a minimum of $100 for a photo, we'd be back in the early days again."    I pay Netflix something like $10 a month for all I can eat streaming.   I remember when first run movies were $6 in theaters.   When the process of making a print requires either fairly expensive automated photo processing or skilled darkrooom work, photos weren't cheap, and having a decent camera was less common.   Going to a movie in a theater is still a different experience than seeing one on even the largest flat screen at home, but more and more movies are being released for streaming within a year of release. 

 

I haven't had a license since late June.  What part of it is the virus?  What I'm photographing may not be commercial enough.   I may not be a particularly good enough photographer.   But for the rare things I've gone after that I have licensed, I don't get the $3 sales.   I get $45 to $190.  And the rare things are harder for tourists on vacation to have shot, or for every cat mommy or daddy to have shot.   Picking my shots is the only thing I have control over.   And this makes it hard.   But also something most people won't be doing.   A million shot of the Taj Mahal -- but only twice have I seen photographers doing something with the Taj Mahal that wasn't the typical shot of the front.  One was from an Alamy photographer; the others were on Photo.net.

 

And some of this is getting the public to believe that it should pay creators (high budget things also get pirated), but the people doing ebook piracy said that asking the same price for a digital file that a paperback book cost was stupid.   The cost of producing and distributing a digital file -- book, photo, movie, music -- is minimal compared to the cost of producing and distributing a physical copy of those.  Harper-Collins has periodic Amazon sales of ebooks for around US $2, and I've earned out on one of my books with them based on those sales (advance was $20,000). 

 

Alamy's strategy needs to include the things that are rare, that will convince people who license photos that they can find everything they want at Alamy. 

 

The whole shift in media in my lifetime changed a lot of things.   Shoplifting was hard compared to finding torrents and downloading. 

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1 hour ago, MizBrown said:

 

 

 

 

The whole shift in media in my lifetime changed a lot of things.   

 

 

Done a little research and it shows there are still plenty of magazines (print/online) covering all types of subjects in UK that would require imagery to make their publications more appealing to the consumer. If you extend this to Europe and beyond then there is still a massive market for good quality,  interesting photographs.

 

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On 19/12/2020 at 16:31, meanderingemu said:

 

bad news for me is that they use quantity as a key indicator.   always thought Alamy was about quality. 

 

I'm sure that if you were a customer you would consider both equally important.

 

Alan

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1 minute ago, Cee Dee Dickinson said:

 

 

Done a little research and it shows there are still plenty of magazines (print/online) covering all types of subjects in UK that would require imagery to make their publications more appealing to the consumer. If you extend this to Europe and beyond then there is still a massive market for good quality,  interesting photographs.

The print magazines and newspapers now use electronic files for setting up printing.   When I worked for a small country weekly in the mid 70s, a couple of us shot film, our pressman developed it and printed it sized for our columns.  The paper sent the copy and photographs to a job printer in Mt. Airy, NC, for printing.   Layout was still printed copy from a compositing machine (and we had an old hot lead machine in the office style, but never used that).

 

True there is still a market for good quality, interesting photographs that accurately illustrate something. 

 

If someone is trying to find photos of a particular plant, bird, or fish, to illustrate an article on that particular plant, bird, or fish, they don't want a photo that's been mislabeled or which is of something else.   Looking for a Union Civil War saber, you don't want a photo of some other bladed weapon.  And, yeah, not all photo researchers will know the difference.

 

Even a fairly unaccomplished photographer can use the rule of thirds grid, auto focus, and auto exposure to turn out pleasant enough photos that accurately illustrate something, even if the photographer doesn't know what the hell they've just photographed.

 

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