New front pages

[Travelshots]

I wonder if they have been any improvement in sales generally to alamy after the new front pages came out. The computer must be able to monitor how many people are logging in and how many sales are being made it will be interesting to have this information Peter

[Travelshots]

I also wondered how many of the very creative arty type images actually sell? There are some brilliant pictures there but are they pictures that people want to buy commercially? Stock photography to me was always a source of images that people could not obtain by going out and taking the camera shots at the time that they needed the image i.e. if you needed a Snowscape image in the middle of July you went to a stock Agency to buy the picture. If you yourself submit lots of these highly creative images do you get a good sales?

[Brian Yarvin]

Peter:

 

Over the long haul, the answer from my experience - as a photographer an (very long ago) an agency employee - is that those "creative" images earn vastly more than any other category. That's been true industry-wide and over many decades and that means nothing today. All of the agencies that once were able to generate big revenue from such images have been ground to dust by the price wars and outside interference of the past twenty years. Commercial clients are spending more money than ever on work like this, they're just not buying it as stock.

 

May I suggest asking instead if Alamy can sell images like those in a quantity great enough to generate revenue? This seems more to the point. I like seeing them try. The stock photo boom of the eighties and nineties was about these creative images and they made some very talented photographers real money.

 

I don't want to disagree with your definition of stock photography - it suits the modern internet search and ultra-low price model perfectly - but as somebody with experience in these sorts of images, I think it's worth it to remind us of the past.

 

If stock photography is going to regain any of the status and pricing it once had, it will have to reach the clients with the biggest budgets and creative commercial work is what it takes.

[sb photos]

15 hours ago, Travelshots said:

I also wondered how many of the very creative arty type images actually sell? There are some brilliant pictures there but are they pictures that people want to buy commercially? Stock photography to me was always a source of images that people could not obtain by going out and taking the camera shots at the time that they needed the image i.e. if you needed a Snowscape image in the middle of July you went to a stock Agency to buy the picture. If you yourself submit lots of these highly creative images do you get a good sales?

 

My thoughts too. Only Alamy knows, and they aren't likely to disclose commercially sensitive data.

[Harry Harrison]

The new Home page seems to be striving very hard to promote so-called 'Creative' imagery and of course that must be a good thing. However I don't think that searching within Ultimate, Vital, Uncut or Foundation actually fulfills that promise. The 500 or so sample images are indeed impressive but searching in 'Creative' is a dispiriting and slow process, there's usually a lag of 20 or 30 seconds as the server dices up the search results into these different options and the images that are offered up are often not at all what anyone might expect to find. The problem is surely how images are separated into these collections in the first place, apart from Ultimate it must be entirely automated, there are 300 million images to choose from after all.

 

In addition the Home page has no mention at all of Editorial imagery which has surely been the core market for Alamy up to this point.

Edited September 5, 2022 by Harry Harrison

[Inchiquin]

20 hours ago, Travelshots said:

I wonder if they have been any improvement in sales generally to alamy after the new front pages came out. The computer must be able to monitor how many people are logging in and how many sales are being made it will be interesting to have this information Peter

 

My own experience is that sales have virtually dried up since the change

 

Alan

[John Mitchell]

10 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

The new Home page seems to be striving very hard to promote so-called 'Creative' imagery and of course that must be a good thing. However I don't think that searching within Ultimate, Vital, Uncut or Foundation actually fulfills that promise. The 500 or so sample images are indeed impressive but searching in 'Creative' is a dispiriting and slow process, there's usually a lag of 20 or 30 seconds as the server dices up the search results into these different options and the images that are offered up are often not at all what anyone might expect to find. The problem is surely how images are separated into these collections in the first place, apart from Ultimate it must be entirely automated, there are 300 million images to choose from after all.

 

In addition the Home page has no mention at all of Editorial imagery which has surely been the core market for Alamy up to this point.

 

I agree. Unless Alamy fixes the dysfunctional filters, I don't see how sales for "creative" images are going to take off. As it stands, the "All" filter is the only one that works properly. Also, the Ultimate, Vital, Uncut and Foundation filters take so long to come up with search results (most of which are puzzling) that customers must forget what they were looking for. Then there's the annoying "same contributor" filter that refuses to go away. 😴

[eclectic]

The home page appears to have stopped the flashing images, static ones now! 🙂

[spacecadet]

8 minutes ago, eclectic said:

The home page appears to have stopped the flashing images, static ones now! 🙂

Nah, they've frozen your computer........

[Harry Harrison]

Wow, well spotted! Can the forum claim any credit for this I wonder. Lo and behold the Alamy Home Page is now safe to visit.

[wiskerke]

21 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

Wow, well spotted! Can the forum claim any credit for this I wonder. Lo and behold the Alamy Home Page is now safe to visit.

 

Credit? What if the amount of views drop? 😂

 

wim

[NYCat]

Oh thank heavens. It doesn't please my visual taste but at least I'm not getting dizzy.

 

Paulette

[Betty LaRue]

Oh, my gosh. I can’t believe I don’t fell nauseated to go to the home page now. It got to where if I thought about doing a search, my stomach felt bad before I even got to the home page. Pavlovian conditioning.