New Alamy website layout

[John Mitchell]

I have a feeling that most of my images have been shuffled into the "Irrelevant" collection. 😝

[Harry Harrison]

2 hours ago, Avpics said:

Copy/paste doesn't work into the search box on any but the dashboard page (Chrome).

In fact right-click and paste hasn't been available to me in the main home page search for a long time (also on Chrome), Cntrl/V (PC) or Cmd/V (Mac) would work there however, and still seems to.

[Harry Harrison]

If you do a keyword search in 'All' that seems to behave pretty much as it used to, apart from the giant thumbnails.

 

What I hadn't realised was that If from there you switch to the Creative tab it then searches Ultimate, Vital, Uncut & Foundation and tells you how many results in each. I realised it because it took ages and I couldn't work out why. Also it does offer you up some relevant alternative but relevant keyword searches at the top, that seems like a good idea.

 

I'm sure Vital had an exclamation mark after it at the start of the day - Vital! - it's not there now, good - or was it all just a dream.

 

Edited June 21, 2022 by Harry Harrison

[Doc]

3 hours ago, geogphotos said:

It is much slower.

It is much more confusing.

It is disjointed and fragmented. 

It is claiming to offer unique images when they are available elsewhere.

 

Those are the good points🥴

I am abroad at the moment so only have my phone to look at searches, but from what I have seen I would agree completely. One of Alamys strengths has always been the speed of the searches and that has gone with these “upgrades”.  It smacks of Alamy upgrades of old which were not thought through and not tested properly. 
I think we will see a return to “normal” while they get this sorted out if they can.

 

Kumar

[Avpics]

The database hasn't updated either. Hardly surprising, given the clusterf...

[meanderingemu]

1 hour ago, Rebecca Ore said:

 

One contributor (with a jumping girl in the heron search) has over 280,000 photos up, mostly model released.  Most of these look like photo agency work.

 

Foundation is directed to people putting together composites.

 

Which one of the following is a Foundation image "directed to people putting together composites", and why not the other?

 

 

 

 

 

[Avpics]

...and you can no longer drag and drop, for ease of forum additions.

[Brian Yarvin]

2 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

I have a feeling that most of my images have been shuffled into the "Irrelevant" collection. 😝

 

John, don't worry, when your images reach irrelevant, they'll be warmly greeted my images, which no longer even seem to exist.

[John Mitchell]

6 minutes ago, Brian Yarvin said:

 

John, don't worry, when your images reach irrelevant, they'll be warmly greeted my images, which no longer even seem to exist.

 

That's reassuring (sort of). Have you looked for your images in the new "Invisible" collection?

[meanderingemu]

went and had a look at the sales report, no change there still voids and micro amounts.  

[Rebecca Ore]

8 hours ago, meanderingemu said:

Which one of the following is a Foundation image "directed to people putting together composites", and why not the other?

 

I don't think the people doing these are long term experienced photo editors as much as they're young art school/photography school/graphic marketing recent graduates.   The herons aren't cut outs; the young jumping woman isn't a heron. 

[Brian Yarvin]

10 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

 

That's reassuring (sort of). Have you looked for your images in the new "Invisible" collection?

 

I don't have to - the writing is one the wall. I've only had a couple of sales and a handful of zooms this year. I've never been in the top 500, but this is the worst I'd seen it since 2014 or so. "Invisible" is polite.

[ReeRay]

3 hours ago, Rebecca Ore said:

 

I don't think the people doing these are long term experienced photo editors as much as they're young art school/photography school/graphic marketing recent graduates.   The herons aren't cut outs; the young jumping woman isn't a heron. 

I wonder if they're working from home ?

 

[BidC]

 

I don't really like the new webpage either, but, as I have been working with a number of younger millennials of late (I hope I've got the age spread correct), I'd say these pages have appeal to younger creatives.

 

Perhaps the more creative images are in vogue just now, and 'regular' stock doesn't cut it ... (though, for me, a 0.60p sale whether 'boring' or 'creative' just doesn't cut it either).

 

Focus is all about the young and trendy these days ...

 

[ps: to note, and apologies if its been mentioned before, but clicking on individuals image selection from the forum results in '500 Internal server error' ...]

 

 

 

 

Edited June 22, 2022 by BidC

[Joseph Clemson]

These new categories, Uncut, Foundation, etc. are clearly some kind of experiment as there are only 500 images in each collection. I presume young, upcoming picture buyers will find these categorisations useful and alluring. Can't say they do anything for me, but then again I am neither a picture buyer nor young or upcoming.

 

I'm more concerned about the search facility. If the 'editorial' filter is selected the images returned are very heavily weighted towards images that are or have been submitted through Live News, with a high degree of repetitiveness. I can see that my own soft editorial images, marked as editorial only and intended for editorial usage, do show up but are so far buried as to be pretty well invisible. As I was unceremoniously dumped from submitting Live News in the year before PA took over, this is particularly galling. It would not be unreasonable to ask that Alamy include a Live News filter link next to editorial and make the editorial link return a better spread of soft editorial images. I can see that selecting All does give that better spread, but a news or feature picture editor is not likely to select All as it would mean having to wade through loads of irrelevant images.

 

I'm barely past retirement age but faced with the new Alamy front page, I suddenly feel very old indeed.

[Paulw]

Well I'm glad you guys can get search results. When I try a search now I get no results at all for anything! I've run out of browsers to try so at the moment I've no idea what the hell is going on.

[Avpics]

12 hours ago, Avpics said:

...and you can no longer drag and drop, for ease of forum additions.

Dragging is now possible, indicating that we're not looking at the finished article yet.

[geogphotos]

The danger with too much high fashion in the shop window is that shoppers go elsehere for their weekly groceries. 

[Harry Harrison]

47 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

These new categories, Uncut, Foundation, etc. are clearly some kind of experiment as there are only 500 images in each collection.

Actually that isn't how they work, what you are seeing are the sample photos from each 'category'. I put category in quotes because it's not entirely clear what these are since their titles, apart from perhaps Ultimate, are on the vague side. Also they shouldn't be confused with the old 'Browse by categories' on the previous home page, or with the categories, both primary & secondary, that we enter (pointlessly?) in AIM.

 

Ultimate is claimed to be hand-picked so that is a fixed collection but how they are picked and how many there are is difficult to estimate. Vital, Uncut & Foundation seem to be a combination of search filters and it is not at all clear how these work.

 

For example, search for 'Love' in Creative by switching between each of the 4 headings:

 

Ultimate - 2,785 images

Vital - 2,026,821 images

Uncut - 3,615,399 images

Foundation - 296119 images

Edited June 22, 2022 by Harry Harrison

[BidC]

30 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

The danger with too much high fashion in the shop window is that shoppers go elsehere for their weekly groceries. 

 

It depends upon their budget. Plus, these days profits always come before people ..

[Nodvandigtid]

I think regular website changes are to be welcome and essential but..

 

it's difficult to call the changes with a lack of knowledge about company strategy, market drivers, trends, buyers needs/profiles etc which, rightly, we are not privvy to.

 

On the other hand there is always common sense and as I have written before in my experience PA/Alamy does not do IT changes well.

 

There are loads of glitches from what other contributors are writing- I found the site a complete struggle, even simple things like typing characters into the search field proved problematic.

 

Simply, in my opinion, this is overloaded gimmickry

Less is actually often more

 

Many of us will be members of DACS so yesterday it was refreshing to see an email asking for help in helping them design a new website – that will include survey participation and further personal time but at least it's actually about understanding needs.

 

Back in 2017 my account, completely out of the blue, was actually deleted inside 24 hours – Alamy (and in fairness Contributor Relations did help and it was restored inside a week) could never give a definite explanation as to why it happened.

 

During the course of my investigations I discovered another contributor has the same name but that was ruled out.

 

Before yesterday's changes the two of us had our own portfolios under our own names (even though it was the same) and guess what.... since the changes, when I search under my name the images have gone up by 5295 and the images displayed (all 21K in total) are a mix of the other contributor's and mine.

 

I am off to lie in a darkened room for a while............

[Inchiquin]

On 21/06/2022 at 08:41, VbFolly said:

 

Do you need to tick Editorial only for images to show up under the Editorial tab for example?

 

 

Yes, that appears to be the case from some tests I just made. I haven't tested the following yet, but I'm guessing that if you tick 'Editorial only' on your pics then they won't show up in Creative. So if you have photos that could appeal to both markets (of which I'm sure there are millions) you have to hope that customers don't bother using the category filters.

 

Using the Editorial filter on a search for "sowerby bridge railway station" brings up 43 images (actually 4 photos with multiple similars of each), 41 of which are of Halifax railway station and the other two of Sowerby Bridge station in the 1960s showing Date Taken as July 2018. Brilliant.

 

Time and time again I've given Alamy the benefit of the doubt but this time I'm pissed off.

 

Alan

[Nodvandigtid]

6 minutes ago, Inchiquin said:

Halifax railway station and the other two of Sowerby Bridge station in the 1960s showing Date Taken as July 2018. Brilliant

 

Have a look at 

 

EDVARD MUNCH (1863-1944) Norgwegian artist. This is the 1893 version Stock Photo - Alamy

 

Date taken - 1893 

😱

[Harry Harrison]

29 minutes ago, Inchiquin said:

Using the Editorial filter on a search for "sowerby bridge railway station" brings up 43 images

I actually tried a general search for this first using the main search field on the home page. As Avpics pointed out you can't right-click and paste into this field but that has been true for a while. Instead Cmd/V did the trick on a Mac. Now my search revealed 0 images together with the message:

 

Sorry, we can’t find anything for your search term

It’s possible that we don’t have any imagery, but check your spelling or try changing your keywords

If you’ve searched using an image ID, it might be that the image is not available for sale in your country or it has been removed from the collection and is no longer for sale

 

This rather off-putting message was because the last search I had run was in the Creative>Ultimate section so the system remembers which 'area' you were searching in. It's hard to notice this when searching though. Better to have said "Sorry, we can’t find anything for your search term in Ultimate" I would have thought.

 

On the date shot point, I think there are a great many camera or indeed conventional scanner 'scans' on Alamy where the the Date Shot hasn't been corrected once uploaded.

 

If I'd persevered I would have found a further 22 images in Uncut but 74 in 'All'. As you say, many of these 74 were of Halifax railway station but the caption puts in the connections from that station, one of which is Sowerby Bridge. Probably too much information I would have thought.

Edited June 22, 2022 by Harry Harrison

[Harry Harrison]

Just exploring the 'Sowerby railway station' search again, I'm now getting 75 in 'All', 22 in Creative (all from Uncut) and 43 in Editorial as Inchiquin already found. That adds up to 65. I just can't bring myself to work out where the missing 10 are if they're not in Creative or Editorial, perhaps it is obvious to someone?

Edited June 22, 2022 by Harry Harrison