Newbie Ralli from Nova Scotia

[ralli]

https://www.alamy.com/portfolio/1246603.html

 

Hello everyone,

 

looking for critique and opinion about my portofolio since I am completly new to stock photography and ALAMY. Does this kind of photography have any chance of sales?

Thank you very much for your opinions

 

big hello from Nova Scotia

Ralli

[Steve F]

Hi Ralli,

Big hello from (old) Hampshire. Welcome to stock and Alamy!

 

Beautiful landscape picture can sell, but you need to have really good lighting, sky and composition. If you want an idea of what sells, you can have a look here:

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/16942-images-sold-in-august-2023/

 

There's a monthly thread. Be aware that people won't necessarily put their bestsellers on there. Also, try to imagine what a client would/could use your image for. Keep a look out for published stock photos (you can see in the photo credits) - these are the 'winners'. How do yours compare in terms of subject, composition, lighting...?

 

You can have people in stock photos. Images with people in and people doing particular activities (e.g. hiking) sell well. You don't need a model release - just in Alamy Image Manager note that you have x people and that you don't have a model release. The image can then be licensed for editorial use, but not for advertising.

 

Finally, as you won't know what sells yet, I would recommend initially uploading as diverse a selection of images as you can manage.

 

 

Some advice on your captions and keywording:

Captions are searchable by clients. Your captions are far too short. Aside from that, clients will be reading captions on search pages by hovering over an image. If they're looking for e.g. a certain place and neither the place nor the country is mentioned in the caption, they will probably move swiftly on to one of the hundreds of other images available.

Include the Latin as well as the common name of plants, insects and the location (including the country). Some helpful links:

https://www.alamy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Captions-and-Tags-checklist.pdf

https://www.alamy.com/blog/tips-for-your-captions-from-the-sales-team

https://www.alamy.com/blog/captions-and-tags

 

Try to make use of all 150 letters available to you in the caption. Include British and American spellings, e.g. color and colour. You should include what you can see in the image and any extra wording to try to make an image more saleable, e.g.:

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/16942-images-sold-in-august-2023/?do=findComment&comment=344625

 

You should be aware of CTR (click through rate). 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 350 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.

 

Good luck,

Steve

 

Edited August 31, 2023 by Steve F

[Mr Standfast]

+1 for everything Steve has said.

 

Nice pictures.

Keywords. Yes don't spam but be aware the search engine takes a literal approach to keywords.  So if you add Canada consider adding Canadian, if you add Coast consider adding Coastal etc.

Have a look at published travel pictures, very often there is someone in frame, it makes the viewer think it could be them stood  there. As Steve says don't be afraid of having somone in frame; there's lots of information the Alamy blog about licences and releases.

Get familiar with the Alamy Measures tool All of Alamy. It shows whta people are looking for and most importantly the type of search terms used.

Try to broaden your portfolio perhaps with some of the local business, cafes, independent shops, sign to the car park(!), farmers market, environmental stuff. Whatever you see.

So many ideas here:-

https://www.alamy.com/category.aspx

 

You're going to need quite a few more pictures to make regular cash.

 

All the best and good luck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[kimba]

What the others said ...

 

Amp up your editing skills - use those sliders in Photoshop or Lightroom! Little tweaks can greatly improve an image. While I'm not a fan of cropping, sometimes the cropping tool can make the difference between an unusable or usable image.