Selling photos

[Alex G]

Could someone please have a look at some of my photos and give me some advice. I have been using Alamy for a few months now and can't seem to even get views. Thanks

 

[geogphotos]

You need to write proper captions - what, where etc

 

Just having the caption 'Beach' is no good at all. 

 

What is the beach called, which ocean, location, landscape features, what is showing in the photos, oblique/overhead angle.

 

Describe the photo using keywords so that a potential buyer can find your pics. 

[Mr Standfast]

As Ian says, some help here:

 

https://www.alamy.com/blog/captions-and-tags?utm_campaign=1921875_Blog update - April 2021&utm_medium=email&utm_source=contributoremail&dm_i=2SWW,156XF,12IMQ4,4EQ47,1

 

and

 

https://ablog.wpengine.com/captions-and-tags

 

 

Lots of discussion on the forum; search for: discoverability

[Alex G]

Thanks so much for the help

[Phil Robinson]

I may be wrong but I suspect you are also contributing to another agency where they provide 'suggested keywords' when you upload new stock, and copying them over to here, or maybe using a program to generate keywords. 
These can sometimes be useful but often are irrelevant, which harms you on Alamy.
There's a photo of dolphins 2RBWCJK which includes the keywords 'aquarium, coral, fish, plankton, reef, seaweed' none of which are in the photo.
You have some really nice pics but as the others have said, more detail in the captions and more accurate keywords (there's another of a large tanker keyworded 'tug boat' which it isn't, and no mention of the ship in the caption.)

Edited February 11 by Phil Robinson

[Michael Ventura]

In addition to the comments above, many of the photos have blown out highlights - no detail in the lighter areas. 

[Steve F]

Hi Alex, good advice from everyone above.

 

Imagine you're a client. You want a generic pretty beach picture and put in the keyword beach. Over 10 million results just on Alamy. And your beach pictures are not very pretty generic pictures.

So imagine a buyer looking for a specific beach. You haven't put the beach name or location in your keywords or your caption. How will a buyer ever find your picture?

 

Stock libraries are a bit like Google. You need to have good keywording and captions so your images actually show up somewhere near the top of the results. As well as producing quality pictures obviously.

 

Good luck,

Steve

[John Mitchell]

Make sure you don't overexpose images. Shoot in RAW so that you can recover some detail in the highlights during post-processing. Aim for more variety -- there are zillions of beach and coastline images out there. Best of luck.

[Steve F]

Just had a quick look at your images. In addition to what John and Michael have mentioned about blown out highlights, the sunset images have very underexposed land - basically a mass of black that takes up half of the image. This really only works if the black silhouette has an interesting shape - otherwise it's too boring. Need to use software to lift the shadows / change the exposure of the land. There's also some dolphin pod images where the dolphins are so far away that they look like specks in the image. These are unlikely to license. Agree with John again, shoot more variety.