New Alamy website layout

[meanderingemu]

7 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. 

 

so we still don't know how to set up my images so that they get to the right category.  

[meanderingemu]

38 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

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?

 

Had a quick look, one of the significant set that gets "lost" is the 1998 construction set.  I would hazard a guess these were uploaded as "archive" or "reportage", they have a "may contain imperfection" notice. 

 

 

this would be a major issue they get lost. 

Edited June 22, 2022 by meanderingemu

[Inchiquin]

39 minutes ago, meanderingemu said:

 

Had a quick look, one of the significant set that gets "lost" is the 1998 construction set.  I would hazard a guess these were uploaded as "archive" or "reportage", they have a "may contain imperfection" notice. 

 

 

I don't think so, because the two old photos I mentioned that appeared in Editorial were from the archive collection and marked as such.

 

Alan

[meanderingemu]

11 minutes ago, Inchiquin said:

 

I don't think so, because the two old photos I mentioned that appeared in Editorial were from the archive collection and marked as such.

 

Alan

 

 

is there an easy way to tell if it's Reportage vs Archive?   

 

 

still probably not that, as i am now doubting the Halifax stations were uploaded as LN, which i had assumed since recent, the caption looks more Reportage. (though it may have been edited after).... (and again getting mad at being told to "go fail QC a few times before getting access to Reportage" )

Edited June 22, 2022 by meanderingemu

[BobD]

I just did a search for "bird with worm".

The Ultimate image is of a man running on a beach without a bird or worm in sight.

Furthermore there is no bird or worm in the keywords or description, so how is the "ultimate" image arrived at.

 

This change is more likely to frustrate and drive customers away IMHO.

[Cal]

4 hours ago, BidC said:

 

 

Perhaps the more creative images are in vogue just now, and 'regular' stock doesn't cut it ... (

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a while now I've felt that Alamy is trying to hugely distance itself from the editorial market. Sort of pretending it doesn't exist, like the relative in the family no-one gets on with. On the new home page, Live News is down below the other categories and even on a large screen you have to scroll to get to it. Despite claims that they are not and have no intention to become a microstock agency, a lot of the content I see Alamy promote on their socials is exactly the kind of stuff that is a dime a dozen on MS agencies. I don't think I've ever seen them promote a hard hitting, "shock value" editorial piece.

Edited June 22, 2022 by Cal

[Reimar]

2 minutes ago, Cal said:

 

For a while now I've felt that Alamy is trying to hugely distance itself from the editorial market. Sort of pretending it doesn't exist, like the relative in the family no-one gets on with. On the new home page, Live News is down below the other categories and even on a large screen you have to scroll to get to it. Despite claims that they are not and have no intention to become a microstock agency, a lot of the content I see Alamy promote on their socials is exactly the kind of stuff that is a dime a dozen on MS agencies. I don't think I've ever seen them promote a hard hitting, "shock value" editorial piece.

It looks like Alamy are going for the lucrative 25 cent sales, instead of pitching to their strength.

[meanderingemu]

19 minutes ago, BobD said:

I just did a search for "bird with worm".

The Ultimate image is of a man running on a beach without a bird or worm in sight.

Furthermore there is no bird or worm in the keywords or description, so how is the "ultimate" image arrived at.

 

This change is more likely to frustrate and drive customers away IMHO.

 

well that would be the ultimate.....  😆

 

 

of course it an agency image, and i don't actually see the word "With" in caption nor KW.  (bird is in "early bird", and worm is most likely there from a KW generator that saw "early bird" or a misspelling of "warm"). 

[Shergar]

1 hour ago, meanderingemu said:

 

 

is there an easy way to tell if it's Reportage vs Archive?   

 

 

still probably not that, as i am now doubting the Halifax stations were uploaded as LN, which i had assumed since recent, the caption looks more Reportage. (though it may have been edited after).... (and again getting mad at being told to "go fail QC a few times before getting access to Reportage" )

Alamy seems to have come up with something that's as useful for its  customers as "what should I shoot next" is for its contributors !!!!

Edited June 22, 2022 by Shergar

[Betty LaRue]

I went from having a great zoom numbers and decent sales to suddenly no zooms or sales. Way to go, Alamy.

Maybe instead of purging old useless accounts or poor images, this is the way to do it without actually needing to delete them. And most of us have been caught up in it.

Betty

[NYCat]

Trying to search on my iPhone and just getting “application error “ no matter what I do. 

 

Paulette

[Dave Richards]

5 minutes ago, NYCat said:

Trying to search on my iPhone and just getting “application error “ no matter what I do. 

 

Paulette

I get the same with my iPhone. Not sure why I’m even bothering to look.

[Dave Richards]

25 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

I went from having a great zoom numbers and decent sales to suddenly no zooms or sales. Way to go, Alamy.

Maybe instead of purging old useless accounts or poor images, this is the way to do it without actually needing to delete them. And most of us have been caught up in it.

Betty

I haven’t had any zooms for a couple of weeks. I could usually count on a few a week but they’ve dried up now.

[wiskerke]

2 minutes ago, Dave Richards said:

I get the same with my iPhone. Not sure why I’m even bothering to look.

 

I was just about to post: all probably looks great on the iPhones of the designer and the consultant. Maybe the iPads then. Let's hope so.

 

Most of the Ultimate images I have checked so far do appear on some other stock outlet. Except for that one S*o image!

So maybe that hugely successful team has now been promoted to redesign the whole of Alamy?

 

wim

[Robert M Estall]

still getting a few zooms, but here we are at the 22nd of the month and zero sales. Never happened before

[Rebecca Ore]

2 hours ago, Betty LaRue said:

I went from having a great zoom numbers and decent sales to suddenly no zooms or sales. Way to go, Alamy.

Maybe instead of purging old useless accounts or poor images, this is the way to do it without actually needing to delete them. And most of us have been caught up in it.

Betty

 

I did my search for "Nicaragua."  Someone (agency?) uploaded a lot of photos of stamps.  In some other photos, the Metropolitan Museum in NYC may be uploading as an agency, or has contracted to an agency (artifacts with no museum listed, photographer Met/Mus or something like that).  Many of my photos and Reuters's photos were showing up by the second and third pages.  

 

Hard turn toward volume but with some curated collections for advertising?   I suspect that one has to have some sense of history to do really good news and editorial shots.  Advertising perhaps not so much.  The leaping girl in the herons might have been doing a heron pose, but if she was, that wasn't mentioned.   (My most uncharitable speculation is that these employees are children and nieces and nephews of people connected enough to get them jobs and who want to move on to writing movie criticism for newspapers and magazines).

 

If the photos also appear on other stock sites, going cheap makes some sense for PA and entities uploading outtakes from commercial photo sessions.   Anything for them is bonus money since the shots are already paid for.

[John Mitchell]

2 hours ago, Betty LaRue said:

I went from having a great zoom numbers and decent sales to suddenly no zooms or sales. Way to go, Alamy.

Maybe instead of purging old useless accounts or poor images, this is the way to do it without actually needing to delete them. And most of us have been caught up in it.

Betty

 

I'm in the same boat. My account now appears to be stagnant, with no zooms or sales being reported. Something is rotten in...

[John Mitchell]

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

 

I dunno. I really can't see anyone -- young, old, or in between --falling for this kind of marketing hype.

 

[Harry Harrison]

I wonder what it is about Iphones, my SE 1st Gen. seems to be OK, running iOS 15.5

[Rebecca Ore]

Only good thing about this are the larger thumbnails.  Search can go quite weird. 

[Harry Harrison]

8 hours ago, meanderingemu said:

Had a quick look, one of the significant set that gets "lost" is the 1998 construction set.  I would hazard a guess these were uploaded as "archive" or "reportage", they have a "may contain imperfection" notice. 

Yes, you're right, all 9 of those plus the document picture, "Sessional papers of the Dominion of Canada" which is in fact Public Domain. The black & white and sepia images of the station in the early 1900s do come up in Editorial though, presumably because they are tagged as such.

 

I might be imagining this but I thought that when an 'Editorial only' image was found in a search previously it had a 'This image may be used for editorial purposes only' flag by it.

 

Edit:

Yes, it still does as I've just looked at one of mine, the flag says "Available for editorial use only. Get in touch for any commercial  or personal uses ."

 

However none of these Sowerby Railway Station editorial images seem to have that.

Edited June 22, 2022 by Harry Harrison

[Harry Harrison]

To add to the confusion Joseph was correct to say that Ultimate, Vital, Uncut, and Foundation were indeed 'collections' because I just found them on the wayback machine here:

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20220608062544/https://www.alamy.com/fresh-picks/

 

I hadn't realised because it's a long time since I could bring myself to look at the home page. However imagine my surprise when I looked down the current home page and found that they are still there, 150 images in each:

 

https://www.alamy.com/fresh-picks/

 

This in addition to the 500 or so sample images for each shown elsewhere, and add to that the fact that these 'collections' have morphed into a way of searching the library, effectively slicing up the 'Creative' non-editorial images.

[MariaJ]

Even if they fix the search engine troubles, I don't see how my mainly editiorial set of images fits in with the avant garde creative agency that they are now branding themselves as on their home page  (e.g., guy face down on a mirror).   I would imagine their regular clients would be confused too. 

[Inchiquin]

12 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

 

I might be imagining this but I thought that when an 'Editorial only' image was found in a search previously it had a 'This image may be used for editorial purposes only' flag by it.

 

Edit:

Yes, it still does as I've just looked at one of mine, the flag says "Available for editorial use only. Get in touch for any commercial  or personal uses ."

 

However none of these Sowerby Railway Station editorial images seem to have that.

 

 

This is rather disconcerting, because none of my own images of the station are there. They all appear under Creative but none under editorial.

 

So if, as you've suggested above, some other criteria apart from the 'Editorial Only' flag are being used to determine what appears in Editorial, photographers such as myself who rely heavily on editorial sales are basically taking pot luck on whether our pictures are ever going to be seen by customers.

We need clarification on this from Alamy. This is not the way to run a picture agency.

 

Alan

[ReeRay]

Try switching amongst the three categories. So slow.

 

And then when it finally arrives ....................."502 Bad Gateway"

 

I really can't see buyers tolerating this. 

Edited June 23, 2022 by ReeRay