Feedback most welcome

[PeterStuart]

Hi Fellow Alamy members,

I used to get reasonable sales at reasonable prices but in the last few months it seems as though the market has fallen off the cliff?

 

I would be grateful if some one might point me in the right direction.

Is the market for my images limited?

Are my images in the wrong sector, should they ALL be set to rights free?

Are my images of poor quality?

 

Or is there something else I should be doing?

 

Many thanks for your input and good luck with your sales

 

The Rambling Tog

https://www.alamy.com/search/imageresults.aspx?pl=1&plno=650769

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by PeterStuart
link

[Steve F]

Hi Peter (Terry's Old...?)

Prices have a dropped a lot for a lot of people, there's various threads about it on the Forum.

 

I can't answer about whether the market for your images is limited. What I suggest is that you go on a few threads for 'How was your Jan 2022 / Feb 2022 etc.' and compare how many sales you get for your portfolio size, compared with other contributors.

 

I'm doing fine with almost all my images set to Rights Managed. Alamy often sells under a kind of hybrid license anyway.

 

Image quality looks fine. Except, I don't particularly like the overdarkening of some of the skies - the lighting doesn't seem to match the light on the landscape. And not a big fan of some of the obvious vignettes that have been added - clients can add these themselves after purchase if they want to. You've also got a few motion blur abstract pictures, but you haven't labelled them as such.

 

Your captions could do with some work:

New summer crop fields heading towards harvest time in Northern England  - Image ID: 2JF1K2H

What type of crop, what month, what county?

 

11.06.2022 Silverdale, Lancashire, UK.Warton Crag is a limestone hill in north west Lancashire, England. It lies to the north west of Warton village, - Image ID: 2JCTR52

I can't see a crag, just a woman sitting on a bench and smiling at the camera.

 

Wild Boar Fell is a mountain in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, on the eastern edge of Cumbria, England. At 2,323 feet, it is either the 4th-highes - Image ID: 2JBE8C9

Looks like you've copied and pasted from another agency and the end of your caption got chopped off. You've got it on a few photos.

 

You are also keyword spamming, which will hurt your CTR rank:

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 300 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.

 

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.

 

I hope this helps,

Steve

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by Steve F

[Betty LaRue]

I agree with Steve.

image #2JDT86J looks to be a scone with jam and/or butter or clotted cream on an outdoor picnic table, with a person’s hand showing. None of those keywords are listed. Instead a generic batch of keywords that look to be describing a scenic view, not this image, are applied. No way would a buyer find your scone image if that’s what she/he were looking for.

Your caption which mentions how one would apply the butter or jam is irrelevant. Describe what you see only in the caption, not what the person (or you) might be thinking or contemplating.

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by Betty LaRue

[ColdCoffee]

Your captions are only focused around the location. If you also focus on active adults/middle age people hiking, biking etc. would be a very relevant subject. Especially if you have model releases for the people. The trend is going away form the perfect looking models, to more natural looking normal people doing common things.

 

I like your photos. maybe slightly too many similars.

 

That said, my sales have also fallen off the cliff since late June.

[sooth]

2JCTPNR

 

Raw milk dispenser illustrating a trend toward automation, farm to consumer, etc.  yet all the keywords relating to the image, there were only a few that mattered, raw milk technology machine healthy..., everything else was about italian coffee, restaurant, fresh fruit glass  🤷

Edited July 28, 2022 by sooth

[Rebecca Ore]

Check the St. Bernards unless the dog owner told you that's what they were.  Looks like Bernese Mountain Dogs to me, and that's the long haired version of Greater Swiss Mountain Dogs.  https://www.bubblypet.com/saint-bernard-colors-and-markings/

 

In St. Bernards, black and white is a color fault.  Someone looks for an example of a breed generally wants the standard color and coat.   Dog breed searches do show up. 

 

You have various instances of livestock where the breed/crosses/ might be worth having -- ponies grazing,  then Image ID: 2J7J935 cattle in a "ling" ?line.  Looks like Herefords and Hereford crosses and a few others.  Herefords are generally a beef cow.   Same for the sheep -- local long wool breed (I used to know the names), what else?  Image ID: 2J3DDPF is an alpaca or a llama (head looks like alpaca to me, but I'm not an expert.  Exotic farm animals, exotic country pets, Scottish alpaca farming/pet keeping.

 

Other thing, I don't see many people putting the date as the first item in a caption unless it's very significant (contruction work on a landmark church, say).

Edited July 29, 2022 by Rebecca Ore
more examples.

[CAROL SAUNDERS]

Just clicked on your 2JDT86J image as I like food.  This one is of scone and jam, but I think you may need to check your keywords as you have i.e., hiking/trekking/forest/glen etc., which are not relevant.  Reminds me to check my own keywords😉

 

Carol

[spacecadet]

31 minutes ago, CAROL SAUNDERS said:

you may need to check your keywords

Agreed, far too much batch copy/pasting and too many similars and unidentified peaks.

The Pen-y Ghent caption is very similar to the Wikipedia page.

Likewise the scone caption seems to have been copied from the "You" magazine website, article dated 30/8/19.

Edited July 29, 2022 by spacecadet

[NYCat]

I took a look at captions and keywords. Very few seemed to match the image. Pretty awful. Sorry, but I kept thinking "what was he thinking?' 

 

Paulette

[sooth]

1 hour ago, spacecadet said:

Agreed, far too much batch copy/pasting and too many similars and unidentified peaks.

The Pen-y Ghent caption is very similar to the Wikipedia page.

Likewise the scone caption seems to have been copied from the "You" magazine website, article dated 30/8/19.

Reminds me of a person I discovered recently who wholesale cut and pasted keywords and captions lifted word for word from various websites, A contributors, and myself incl my name in their keywords. Upon complaint, Alamy asked this person to  remove my name from their keywords; they have not done so.

Edited July 29, 2022 by sooth

[NYCat]

3 hours ago, sooth said:

Reminds me of a person I discovered recently who wholesale cut and pasted keywords and captions lifted word for word from various websites, A contributors, and myself incl my name in their keywords. Upon complaint, Alamy asked this person to  remove my name from their keywords; they have not done so.

 

I think Alamy can do it. I've had mine removed almost immediately when I've complained.

 

Paulette

[MariaJ]

The images look good, but as others have said, the keywording needs improvement.  I clicked on the image of a tractor in a field (2JNGP3F) and the keywords included many irrelevant keywords, including: coastal landscape, bay, beach, sea, seascape, ocean, mountain, lighthouse etc.      These need to be removed as they will not lead to sales, can damage your ranking,  and will frustrate the customers doing the searches.

[Chris1603]

Hi - sorry to sidetrack, but how do you see contributors’ tags / keywords in pictures?

Edited August 23, 2022 by Chris1603

[gvallee]

20 minutes ago, Chris1603 said:

Hi - sorry to sidetrack, but how do you see contributors’ tags / keywords in pictures?

 

Zoom in on a contributor's image and keywords are displayed for that image.