Photos sold for meager amounts in contrast with Alamy´s own rights-managed price calculator

[Eduardo Comesana]

Alamy recently sold one of my reportage stock photos for U$S 10.02 while its own rights-managed price calculator indicates a U$S 249.99 fee. I am a new collaborator since September 2022 but I am unpleasantly surprised at the meager amounts my photos are being sold.

[John Mitchell]

Unfortunately, the price calculator doesn't get much use. It would be nice if it did. Most sales are negotiated and heavily discounted. You have a lot of interesting photos. However, your sales would no doubt increase if you added more keywords and better captions. For example, you have "Iglesia de Guadalupe" in the caption for 2KNEXG8, which shows a giant Olmec head sculpture, not the Guadalupe church. Hope you don't mind my pointing this out. Best of luck.   

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 5, 2023 by John Mitchell

[Marianne]

Lovely work, but it needs to be found. I noticed a Parisian street scene with posters of Marcel Marceau, who died in 2007 shown as having been taken in October 2022 but I'm  assuming these are archival images that you've recently digitized, it would help to correctly use the approximate date or the year they were taken. As @John Mitchell noted, keywords are what clients use to find images. Another wonderful scene of Winged Victory in the Louvre is keyworded with "painting," while missing many relevant keywords.  Someone looking for historical/archival images of Paris will miss these gems. Like John, I'm saying this to help and not as a criticism. I was very drawn to both of those beautiful images. 

 

Prices vary wildly and it's rare to get the full calculator price these days. But it does happen sometimes. Good luck and welcome to Alamy!

[Eduardo Comesana]

John and Marianne are absolutely right with their comments, those Parisian and Mexican images were taken during the 1970s and deserve more precise information. During the last three months I have uploaded thousands of photos. Now is time to do some fine-tuning with the keywords. Thanks for your help and appreciation. 

[Robert M Estall]

Average fees for stock photographs are in the region of $15-$20 now for uses which might have been maybe 10 times that 25 years ago although you might get lucky and receive something like the older rates occasionally. Your work all seems to be B&W , so the good news is that B&W doesn't seem to be discounted to 50% against colour any more. I can't bear to think about how many times I had to argue the case that B&W was much more expensive for photographers to produce. In this digital age, we can produce good B&W with the camera and computer though perhaps quite the same standard as achievable in the darkroom.

Edited January 9, 2023 by Robert M Estall