Harry Harrison Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 38 minutes ago, spacecadet said: Well it is aimed more at buyers I think that's the point though, we can avoid it, but we're not buying any images. It's the presumption that buyers ("Creatives") would just find it too boring to look for images by simply entering keywords into a search field without at the same time being bombarded with pulsating disco graphics. And then they would be disappointed if they actually found the images they wanted without first being led round the merry-go-round that is the new Ultimate/Vital/Uncut/Foundation/Editorial farrago. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
imageplotter Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 The Editorial Collection search results are abysmal. I have no words. If this isn't fixed, then I guess Alamy will not be around for much longer. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Robinson Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 (edited) On the plus side, the collection search results are so obviously abysmal, hopefully most buyers will realise it doesn't work and ignore the new "offers" and stick to a general old fashioned search. Try searching 'Boris Johnson' (if you feel up to it). First you get a whole page of photos of Boris Johnson. Then click on 'editorial' and he's gone. 2 of the first 40 pics are of him. Lots of James Cleverly, several of Angela Rayner (not even the same party) and 8 admittedly very nice images of a rock with 'Scotland' written on it. Most of what I do is news based (editorial) these days but I file relatively little as Live News. Most of it is sent later as stock and I also go back and spend more time on those images I did file, submitting higher quality versions of them for stock use. If the "editorial" collection is only stuff that was submitted on the news feed, (newest first regardless of subject matter) hardly any of my many best-selling pics of politicians and other editorial material will be in the 'editorial' collection. That would be idiotic, counterproductive, in nobody's interest. But as I said, I suspect regular customers will soon learn to ignore the collection tabs when they realise what a mess they are. Edited July 10, 2022 by Phil Robinson 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 2 hours ago, spacecadet said: Well it is aimed more at buyers and it's easy to avoid- I have all my bookmarks set up so I only see it if it's talked about here and I go deliberately. I admit there's more incentive to stay away now. I know I am a very, very special person but I can't be the only person who can't deal with the flashing moving images. Any buyers who are like me will go elsewhere. Paulette 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 I have googled other stock agencies and haven't found any who are doing this moving image thing. Are there any? It would be a no-brainer for me to go somewhere else rather than deal with what I encounter when googling Alamy. Paulette 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobD Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 (edited) I don't know what they have done now but several searches are showing no results at all in any category. This latest messing around has been a disaster, should have done better testing before making live. Edited July 10, 2022 by BobD 2 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Ventura Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 I really dislike the whole re-design of the search page. There are so many glitches. Another issue, at least for me, when I try to search by contributor's name, down in the contributor's name search box, you have to type super fast or it only takes a portion of what you entered, which never works of course. It just seems like someone launched a stock photo sight for the first time. Not sure if there is any correlation, but my sales are dismal so far this month, and they were not so great last month. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chexy Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 15 minutes ago, Michael Ventura said: I really dislike the whole re-design of the search page. There are so many glitches. Another issue, at least for me, when I try to search by contributor's name, down in the contributor's name search box, you have to type super fast or it only takes a portion of what you entered, which never works of course. It just seems like someone launched a stock photo sight for the first time. Not sure if there is any correlation, but my sales are dismal so far this month, and they were not so great last month. Of course there's a correlation. I had 42 licenses in March. 12 last month and only 1 so far this month. I'm still uploading in the hope that this mess will be fixed. If it doesn't get resolved soon I will stop uploading and consider my options. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry Harrison Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 I'll just log this for the record. I had thought that Live News images only showed up under Editorial when 3 days had passed and they went back into the normal stock. I was clearly wrong because when I was playing about with the contributor search I found the same set of 15 images of Brighton Beach taken today, 10th July, in Live News and also coming up under Editorial. Fortunately the contributor's name is quite short so the system allowed me to type it in. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 4 hours ago, NYCat said: I have googled other stock agencies and haven't found any who are doing this moving image thing. Are there any? It would be a no-brainer for me to go somewhere else rather than deal with what I encounter when googling Alamy. Paulette I haven't done much Googling around, but I can't think of any stock agencies that have taken visual bombardment to the extremes Alamy now has. I guess they wanted to stand out from the crowd. They have succeeded in that regard, but maybe not in a positive way. The new Alamy owners obviously don't care about what we longtime contributors think of the recent website changes (and resulting mess), but they might be wise to poll their customers to get their feedback. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meanderingemu Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 48 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said: I'll just log this for the record. I had thought that Live News images only showed up under Editorial when 3 days had passed and they went back into the normal stock. I was clearly wrong because when I was playing about with the contributor search I found the same set of 15 images of Brighton Beach taken today, 10th July, in Live News and also coming up under Editorial. Fortunately the contributor's name is quite short so the system allowed me to type it in. Live News images had started showing up immediately in stock searches when you looked under New for the past few months, so this must be the code they are using. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sb photos Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 1 hour ago, Chexy said: Of course there's a correlation. I had 42 licenses in March. 12 last month and only 1 so far this month. I'm still uploading in the hope that this mess will be fixed. If it doesn't get resolved soon I will stop uploading and consider my options. I sympathise with you. Myself I decided to continue as 'normal' throughout this year then to reassess if it's still worth the effort. That decision still stands.. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Avpics Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 49 minutes ago, meanderingemu said: Live News images had started showing up immediately in stock searches when you looked under New for the past few months... Indeed. I've had images licenced as PUs straight off the live news feed. I don't know how they guard against other 'stock' sales from news images whilst still 'live'. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cryptoprocta Posted July 10, 2022 Share Posted July 10, 2022 24 minutes ago, Avpics said: Indeed. I've had images licenced as PUs straight off the live news feed. I don't know how they guard against other 'stock' sales from news images whilst still 'live'. I'm not sure that they do, unless $1.69 gross is a LN price. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobD Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 Another problem I have found is that if you click on ' see all vital images (for search term)' , the results seems to show all images not just the so called 'vital'. I haven't checked to see if the other categories work the same. Also in a lot of searches I don't seem to be able to zoom my own images. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geogphotos Posted July 11, 2022 Author Share Posted July 11, 2022 Not sure what all this means in the big picture but from my limited viewpoint it is extremely demotivating. Things were hard enough already. Now, from the look of things, the situation if much worse, No point saying more. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gvallee Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 I know that some specific questions like LU significance have to asked to CR, but has any of the very useful in-depth testing shown in the Forum been reported to CR? CR does not read the forum and no action will be taken based on comments here. My experience from previous equally abysmal c*k ups. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry Harrison Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 Someone from Alamy reads them so I'm sure that they could forward them to CR or whoever is tasked to deal with them. Would they not do so out of spite? If I had launched a new website with so many major issues I'd be looking at all ways that could possibly help to root out the problems and if it meant asking someone to spend half an hour reading a couple of forum posts then I would have thought that would be time well spent. In fact a forum is the best way to reveal such problems because we can all chip in, it may just be user error, or a temporary glitch, but in time certain issues rise to the surface as being permanent problems that seriously affect the functioning of the new site. However we are not paid by Alamy to do this so although I've been tempted to do it I don't think it is down to us to file a report to Contributor Relations. Also, all of these problems should be quite obvious to anyone tasked to professionally test the site so the fact that they are all still there almost 3 weeks after launch is more than a tad disappointing. 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meanderingemu Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 12 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said: I'm not sure that they do, unless $1.69 gross is a LN price. i have a 1.16. actually 13 cents less the image got as "Stock" 3 months later from same type of licence. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gvallee Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 18 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said: Someone from Alamy reads them so I'm sure that they could forward them to CR or whoever is tasked to deal with them. Would they not do so out of spite? If I had launched a new website with so many major issues I'd be looking at all ways that could possibly help to root out the problems and if it meant asking someone to spend half an hour reading a couple of forum posts then I would have thought that would be time well spent. In fact a forum is the best way to reveal such problems because we can all chip in, it may just be user error, or a temporary glitch, but in time certain issues rise to the surface as being permanent problems that seriously affect the functioning of the new site. However we are not paid by Alamy to do this so although I've been tempted to do it I don't think it is down to us to file a report to Contributor Relations. Also, all of these problems should be quite obvious to anyone tasked to professionally test the site so the fact that they are all still there almost 3 weeks after launch is more than a tad disappointing. Sure, the Forum is the best way to pool resources together and come up with findings. But, in previous releases, Alamy did state that CR do not read the forum and asked us to raise the issues to CR who will pass it on to IT. As a former software tester myself it makes sense to send a detailed description of the issue rather than someone having to sift through posts extracting bits and pieces. It also helps IT to reproduce the issue in the sequence described. That's perfectly alright if you're not inclined to do so. I have no time to do any testing myself. Unfortunately, we might end up in a situation often seen in companies when there are endemic issues, every user knows about them but nobody reported them to Help Desk, hence going undetected and unresolved. I agree that it should have been tested but it obviously has not. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry Harrison Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 2 minutes ago, gvallee said: I agree that it should have been tested but it obviously has not. That's the problem really. I would also be interested to know if anyone has reported these problems directly to CR and if so what the outcome was. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meanderingemu Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 1 minute ago, gvallee said: Sure, the Forum is the best way to pool resources together and come up with findings. But, in previous releases, Alamy did state that CR do not read the forum and asked us to raise the issues to CR who will pass it on to IT. interesting as plenty of the issues brought on after the July 1st change and lack of testing were actually addressed on the forum. Alamy even answers people on a Public MS forum about it, so they do read them. i do find that if you mention @Alamy specifically in post they have more chance of reading it and provide input Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry Harrison Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 3 hours ago, BobD said: the results seems to show all images not just the so called 'vital'. I haven't checked to see if the other categories work the same. They do 3 hours ago, BobD said: Also in a lot of searches I don't seem to be able to zoom my own images. You can't We can see this but it seems Alamy can't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gvallee Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 6 minutes ago, meanderingemu said: interesting as plenty of the issues brought on after the July 1st change and lack of testing were actually addressed on the forum. Alamy even answers people on a Public MS forum about it, so they do read them. i do find that if you mention @Alamy specifically in post they have more chance of reading it and provide input If we're talking about the same MS Forum, Alamy has only addressed the $2 storage fee, nothing else. Yes there is a moderator reading this forum but it does not mean he/she/it/them raises all the issues with IT. I know they haven't in the past. Anyway, I'm retired, I'm not going to argue testing practises. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meanderingemu Posted July 11, 2022 Share Posted July 11, 2022 25 minutes ago, gvallee said: If we're talking about the same MS Forum, Alamy has only addressed the $2 storage fee, nothing else. Yes there is a moderator reading this forum but it does not mean he/she/it/them raises all the issues with IT. I know they haven't in the past. Anyway, I'm retired, I'm not going to argue testing practises. they also addressed the "Inclusivity Survey" there last year Before they even addressed it here, so they seem to be paying attention to that forum 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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