New here. Any advices?

[Mariasz]

Hi, I’ve just started my adventure with alamy. If you have a minute please check out my portfolio and share your opinion;)

Thanks!

 

https://www.alamy.com/portfolio/1302187.html
 

[Alex G]

These are some great photos and you have done really well with your descriptions. If you have added the most possible tags to these then you are off to a great start. The pictures are excellent quality and I wish you all the best in your Alamy journey.

[Jill Morgan]

I'm afraid I don't agree with Alex.  Your images appear sort of dark and muddy to me. You may need to calibrate your monitor.

 

You need much more description in your captions as they are searchable by buyers.  I was looking at the image of the flamingoes and you have no mention on where this photo was taken.  You have both Africa and Asia in your keywords, so it can't be both.  Be more specific on location. If in Africa, then where?  It is a big continent. What is the name of the lake that they flamingoes are in?  When showing birds and animals, also include their latin names. 

 

You have way too many useless keywords that will end up hurting your image placement by Alamy in the long run.  As mentioned, this couldn't have been taken in both Africa and Asia. 

 

Which species of flamingo is this?  It appears to be a Greater Flamingo.  There are six different species of flamingoes.  

 

Don't try to reach that green bar or force yourself to come up with 50 keywords.  Just use keywords that directly relate to your image.  Think like a buyer.  If I were searching for your image, what would I be typing in the search?  I may search "Greater Flamingoes in northern Africa"  or I might be more specific in the location.  I may be publishing a book on the birds of Kenya so I would be looking for those specific keywords.  You have to think like a buyer.

 

You have a lot of misspellings in your keywords as well.

 

I hope this helps.  Not trying to be overly critical, but if you want to be successful you will need to make changes.

 

Jill

Edited February 12 by Jill Morgan

[Steve F]

Hi Mariasz,

That's an interesting mix of pictures. 

 

You are doing some common errors of newcomers to Alamy:

• Keyword spamming (too many keywords / tags)

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 360 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.

• Too short captions

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

 

For example, your hamsa illustrations, you could have something like:

The hamsa, also known as the hand of Fatima, is a palm shaped amulet popular throughout North Africa and the Middle East

 

• Technical quality

You've got a vignette around a lot of your pictures. It can be used judiciously, but clients can add them themselves; it's harder for clients to remove them. I'm assuming it has not been added deliberately in this picture as there's also a lot of barrel distortion from the lens too:

 

 

The white balance looks off in some of the images too:

 

 

These faults can be corrected easily using e.g. Lightroom. Hoping you have access to software - some people on Alamy don't use software, but it tends to make your images less saleable and you will be more likely to fail Alamy QC if you're not post processing.

 

Best of luck,

Steve

 

[Steve F]

6 minutes ago, Jill Morgan said:

I'm afraid I don't agree with Alex.  Your images appear sort of dark and muddy to me. You may need to calibrate your monitor.

 

You need much more description in your captions as they are searchable by buyers.  I was looking at the image of the flamingoes and you have no mention on where this photo was taken.  You have both Africa and Asia in your keywords, so it can't be both.  Be more specific on location. If in Africa, then where?  It is a big continent. What is the name of the lake that they flamingoes are in?  When showing birds and animals, also include their latin names. 

 

You have way too many useless keywords that will end up hurting your image placement by Alamy in the long run.  As mentioned, this couldn't have been taken in both Africa and Asia. 

 

Which species of flamingo is this?  It appears to be a Greater Flamingo.  There are six different species of flamingoes.  

 

Don't try to reach that green bar or force yourself to come up with 50 keywords.  Just use keywords that directly relate to your image.  Think like a buyer.  If I were searching for your image, what would I be typing in the search?  I may search "Greater Flamingoes in northern Africa"  or I might be more specific in the location.  I may be publishing a book on the birds of Kenya so I would be looking for those specific keywords.  You have to think like a buyer.

 

You have a lot of misspellings in your keywords as well.

 

I hope this helps.  Not trying to be overly critical, but if you want to be successful you will need to make changes.

 

Jill

 

+1

[NYCat]

A couple of spelling mistakes I noticed...  It is desert (not dessert) and endangered species. Perhaps you have a friend who can check spellings for you.

 

Paulette

[Alex G]

Hey, it seems that many people disagree with my comment. I am also fairly new and was just wondering if you could explain what you mean by things like adding less keywords. Should it not mean it is more likely to be seen. Or should I edit my photos because I thought if I shot and posted raw photos it would look and people would see it as better.

[Steve F]

5 hours ago, Alex G said:

Hey, it seems that many people disagree with my comment. I am also fairly new and was just wondering if you could explain what you mean by things like adding less keywords. Should it not mean it is more likely to be seen. Or should I edit my photos because I thought if I shot and posted raw photos it would look and people would see it as better.

 

Hi Alex,

Less keywords - explained in my post above. Keywords need to be relevant. Too many irrelevant keywords means your search rank will drop.

I don't understand what your last sentence is trying to say. But ideally, yes, you should be shooting in raw, editing using software and a calibrated monitor, and exporting as a Jpeg.

Steve

 

Edited February 13 by Steve F

[Alex G]

Cheers Steve this helped and clarified a lot. May be a question you don't want to answer but if you wouldn't mind could you share how much you make a month or have made from Alamy all together. I am just trying to figure out how good this might work out for me.

[Mr Standfast]

Alex, look in the how was your month threads.

 

This is a tough market for seasoned contributors. 

 

[Steve F]

4 minutes ago, Alex G said:

Cheers Steve this helped and clarified a lot. May be a question you don't want to answer but if you wouldn't mind could you share how much you make a month or have made from Alamy all together. I am just trying to figure out how good this might work out for me.

 

Hi Alex, you're welcome. 

 

How much I make:

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/17367-so-how-was-2023-for-you/?do=findComment&comment=353494

 

I do relatively well for my portfolio size. Other people will do better and worse than this. But taking a step back, it is very difficult to make a living from stock. Even photographers with very large collections generally don't make enough to live off stock alone. It was possible in the past, but licence values have dropped as the market became saturated with images and the barriers to submitting images have fallen. Most of us on here love photography and want to make some money from it - I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't making money. But if you look at the time involved compared to how much you make per hour, there are much easier ways of making more money. There is a benefit that when you have a larger portfolio, you have a regular passive income with repeat sellers. But it's a lot of work to get to that point. So I guess the question is, how much time do you want to spend on photography, and how much do you need the money?

Steve

[KitJames]

On 12/02/2024 at 11:25, Steve F said:

These faults can be corrected easily using e.g. Lightroom. Hoping you have access to software - some people on Alamy don't use software, but it tends to make your images less saleable and you will be more likely to fail Alamy QC if you're not post processing.

Some camera makers provide RAW development software. OM System/Olympus has OM Workspace, and if it's not the case then there are free software that's pretty capable like Darktable and RawTherapee.

[Steve F]

9 minutes ago, KitJames said:

Some camera makers provide RAW development software. OM System/Olympus has OM Workspace, and if it's not the case then there are free software that's pretty capable like Darktable and RawTherapee.

 

Indeed. 

[Rebecca Ore]

14 hours ago, Alex G said:

Hey, it seems that many people disagree with my comment. I am also fairly new and was just wondering if you could explain what you mean by things like adding less keywords. Should it not mean it is more likely to be seen. Or should I edit my photos because I thought if I shot and posted raw photos it would look and people would see it as better.

 

The point isn't just to get your photographs seen.   It's to get them seen by people looking for that particular thing.  The photo researchers are looking for an illustration for an article (on line or in print).  I saw a false positive today among my views and made changes to the caption.   A British long handled trowel is not a US Citizen, though a US citizen owns it.  Nobody is going to say, "What a great photograph! Let's get someone to write an article to use it in."

 

Alamy has two photos and  several of botanical drawings of a common Central American weed.   The two photos were zoomed.   One had a different style than the other, so photo editor's taste. 

 

The strategies here are photos of things that have been searched for but with only false positives, photos of things that may be commonly photographed, but your photo is more striking/better, and photos of things that may be generically common, but the photo editor is looking for a particular variety, style of bloom, a particular age and nationality doing something. 

 

 

[wiskerke]

5 hours ago, Rebecca Ore said:

The strategies here are photos of things that have been searched for but with only false positives, photos of things that may be commonly photographed, but your photo is more striking/better, and photos of things that may be generically common, but the photo editor is looking for a particular variety, style of bloom, a particular age and nationality doing something.

 

And if I may add, sometimes a good and accurate extra description (under the Optional tab in the Alamy Image Manager) will help the researcher deciding in favor of your image. Provided it's a good quality image of course.

Description is called Additional info in AIM speak.
On the Zoom page it's called More information. Have a look at an image like this.

Remember it's not a searchable field though.

 

wim

[Rebecca Ore]

19 hours ago, wiskerke said:

 

And if I may add, sometimes a good and accurate extra description (under the Optional tab in the Alamy Image Manager) will help the researcher deciding in favor of your image. Provided it's a good quality image of course.

Description is called Additional info in AIM speak.
On the Zoom page it's called More information. Have a look at an image like this.

Remember it's not a searchable field though.

 

wim

 

I use this where the object itself with keywords doesn't give a useful history or cultural significance of what's in the photo.