Vital / Uncut Collections - what's the criteria?

[MB Photography]

I am puzzled as to how images have to be marked so that they appear in the Creative Vital collection.

 

Alamy has stated the following:

 

Vital Collection

Images in this collection are all model released, where there are people, and offer our customers a safe collection of up-to-date lifestyle and commercially usable imagery.

 

 

Uncut Collection

Images in this collection can be for commercial use and are a mix of images that may or may not currently fit into the Ultimate, Vital or Foundation collections. We are still reviewing images in this collection as an ongoing process and may add them to other collections in future.

 

So my recent submissions have Number of People = 0, Property = No, Not editorial and available for consumer, advertising, personal use. Category is Landscape.

 

Non of these images appear in Vital, but they do appear in Uncut. As an experiment I set one of the images to Number of People = 1, Model release = Yes, waited the specified 48 hours for the database refresh, and still it ended up in Uncut.

 

To make things even more confusing, the images I submitted a couple of years ago of the same subject, caption, keywords and optional settings appear in Vital and Uncut collections.

 

I contacted Alamy and they said it was probably because I had not filled in the People or Property fields. This is not the case as I always set these fields.

 

So what's the criteria for these collections?

Update:

Images in Vital we’re uploaded in January 2020, Uncut in September 2019. Bizarre!

Edited July 3 by MB Photography
Update…

[M.Chapman]

I suspect the new system is currently full of bugs... It should have been more thoroughly tested before it went live. Pretty shoddy really.

 

Mark

[John Mitchell]

As far as I can make out, the whole system is now a complete mess. My tiny historical / archival collection of under 500 images is now outperforming the rest of my portfolio in almost every respect. Archival now seems the best way to go. There's not much point in shooting and uploading new images that will just get lost in a huge pile of spaghetti.  🍝

[spacecadet]

13 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

Archival now seems the best way to go

Same here.

Problem is, 1979 is hard to get to.

[John Mitchell]

7 hours ago, spacecadet said:

Same here.

Problem is, 1979 is hard to get to.

 

Most recent sale (just shy of $$$) was 1779. I may really be in trouble. 😮

[Dave Richards]

I’m ignoring these so called collections and I’m wondering if buyers will do the same. If I was buying I would simply be putting my search terms into that nice big search bar in the middle of the home page. Why f**t around doing otherwise?

[Rebecca Ore]

4 hours ago, Dave Richards said:

I’m ignoring these so called collections and I’m wondering if buyers will do the same. If I was buying I would simply be putting my search terms into that nice big search bar in the middle of the home page. Why f**t around doing otherwise?

I can see where searching for all people with releases might be useful for someone looking for advertising photos on a budget, but I think this search was possible without special collections.   The other question is what qualifications do the people making the selections have.   The Vital Collection with a search for Nicaraguan people had half of a page of photos that were fruit and not people, and half people.  A general search for model released Nicaraguan people came up with two pages of photos, all people or parts of people who were probably hired models.

 

 

[Harry Harrison]

6 hours ago, Rebecca Ore said:

The other question is what qualifications do the people making the selections have.

Honestly it can't be people making these decisions for Vital & Foundation, there are far too many images involved. It's people making decisions about how to design the search algorithms but not looking at the actual images. They would have to be looking at every image coming into the library in real-time.

 

We have to believe that Ultimate is hand-picked but hand-picked from what, 295 million images? Again, just like those photography competitions with celebrity judges, the 'grunt' work of finding a short-list to look at is done some other way. Unlike Vital & Foundation the numbers in Ultimate have not changed since the launch though, at least not since last time I looked.

[MB Photography]

Well it’s been several weeks since I reported that the new collections aren’t working.

 

Any new submissions I make don’t get into Vital and end up in Uncut. None of the images have people or property so they meet the required criteria. Some of my older submissions qualify but some don’t.

 

So I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with the way they have been designed and implemented. So these collections, as they stand, don’t add any value to the search.

 

Considering this was the fundamental reason for making the change to the front end web pages, it’s been an epic fail 😵‍💫

[BobD]

I don't think Alamy worries about which images appear in which collection, the whole thing just seems like a marketing ploy to me.

 

AS for the ultimate collection, if I were Alamy I would be embarrassed to call some (not all) of the results an agencies ultimate images.