Critique please!

[MattX]

I’ve been an Alamy member for a number of years. During that time I’ve added additional services (shutterstock, istock etc.) but have, this month, deleted ALL other accounts as I’m fed up with receiving pennies for a photo when Alamy gives me pounds. I’ve made all my images exclusive and am now looking to keyword all my old photos (from when Alamy only used 5 keywords) and add to my portfolio. I’d welcome advice over key wording and what to shoot considering my style which is hopefully evident from my portfolio. 

 

Thanks in advance, Matt. 

 

https://www.alamy.com/portfolio/652316.html

[Jill Morgan]

I haven't keyword checked yet Matt, but you have way too many similars.  There are 4 of the wild tulip that look almost exactly the same, and 4 of the covid sign on the road. You only need one.  Go through and mark for deletion any repetitive images.  It will only hurt your rank over time.

 

Jill

[Brian Yarvin]

Matt, I'm with Jill on this. My first impression is that there are too many similars. You don't need to have that many images from each shoot. This will drag your stats down and affect your placement in client searches.

[MattX]

Great feedback, something I know nothing about is the value of ranking. Does Alamy have an article about it?

[Steve F]

1 hour ago, MattX said:

Great feedback, something I know nothing about is the value of ranking. Does Alamy have an article about it?

 

Your pictures will appear at a certain level (e.g. first page, 10th page... etc.) in searches by clients, depending on various factors. CTR and Sales are the only factors we know about for sure in the secret formula Alamy uses to set our search ranking. Your CTR rank (on your Dashboard) is a function of the number of times a client zooms (clicks on) one of your images versus the number of times your images appear in a client search, but are not zoomed.

CTR=Zooms/Views * 100

This is basically a long way of me saying, don't spam keywords. E.g. don't put sky, blue, clouds for every single outdoors picture you shoot. There is a tendency to try to put lots of keywords for your images to try to get them seen by clients. So they may well appear in searches, but if they're not zoomed by a client, your CTR rank will drop. Which means your images won't show as high up in client searches. You don't want your images to get buried in the 255 million images on Alamy. By all means, put a lot of keywords in for certain pictures if they're relevant. Captions and keywords are almost more important than the image itself because you can have the most amazing images ever, but if they're keyworded wrong, no one will ever see them.

 

Include variant spellings, in particular British and American spellings. Also include singular and plurals  of words if appropriate. Don't worry about moving the line to optimised (green) - we have collectively decided that this is not a good idea unless you really need that many keywords.

[Steve F]

Matt,

Welcome to the exclusive club! 🙃

 

You need to watch your captions:

www.mattxfoto.com- Image ID: 2D8DMJA

Waves crash around the feet of a person on a sandy beach - Image ID: 2CA1EE4. Which beach, which country? Season or month if it's relevant too (probably not for this particular shot). There's two people. Are they children, teenagers, adults?

 

+1 too many similars.

Looks like you might be spamming keywords - see my post above.

 

What sort of editing are you doing? Have you applied lens corrections to get rid of the lens vignetting, or have you deliberately introduced a vignette here? All the other yellow tulip shots on your front page seem to have a vignette too. Plus they're a bit too dark generally.

 

Just a minor one on composition and focal point (and other people may well have a different opinion here), but your eye should be drawn automatically to the focus point in a picture. I actually have to hunt for the focal point in a couple of these pictures. The front flowers are out of focus, fine, gaze moves to the back and automatically to the middle and then hmmmm...., the in-focus petals seem to be right in the top right of the shot. And even then they don't seem too sharp, maybe the white highlights are a bit blown?

 

 

 

Finally, try to add the Latin name as well as the common name for plants and animals - these are also searched for.

 

Hope this helps.

Steve

 

Edited April 21, 2021 by Steve F

[MattX]

Great advice from all, keep it coming.

 

My plan then, is to delete duplicate images first. 

 

Next should deleting irrelevant keywords be my aim OR improving titles/captions?

 

both will be my aim together with improving keywords but there’s plenty to take up my free time in the first step!

[Steve F]

Matt,

Just a quick one on 'duplicate' images. If you're doing a particular subject, you could do a portrait shot, landscape shot, shot close up, far away, looking down on, looking up at, different light / season / time of day. We wouldn't class these as duplicates as such. If you have lots of images of the same subject with minor differences - these would be duplicates.

Steve

[Steve F]

11 minutes ago, MattX said:

Great advice from all, keep it coming.

 

My plan then, is to delete duplicate images first. 

 

Next should deleting irrelevant keywords be my aim OR improving titles/captions?

 

both will be my aim together with improving keywords but there’s plenty to take up my free time in the first step!

 

Personally I'd do it photo by photo, but if you think you're quicker doing it another way, go ahead! The only thing I'd say, is that most of the specific words in your caption should also be included as keywords in the same picture too.