Greetings from Kentucky, USA

[brahephotography]

Howdy folks! I've been shooting photos for quite some time but have never really uploaded them on any type of public site, like Alamy. Living in the US now, but I've traveled a LOT over the past 20 years, have lived in Central Asia for the past ten and have some photos to share from then and now. Please feel free to peruse my collection thus far and leave me some feedback!  
 

One question I already have is that I can't find my photos in the search, even after they've been approved for months. Any idea why that might be?

 

Thanks! I look forward to getting to know some of you and for this community to be mutually beneficial.

 

Cheers,

 

Bobby

[Michael Ventura]

Welcome Bobby.  Nice photos.  Not sure why you are not seeing them, when you click on your image number, "20", they show up.

[Steve F]

Howdy Bobby. Some nice images there. 

 

If you want a more detailed review by the Forum, you can ask for one under 'Portfolio Critique'. But some quick comments:

• Main one - get more images up. Many more. Rough average for contributors is 1 sale per month per 1000 images. At this rate, going to take you years to make a sale. You can improve your sales by having good quality images of subjects that sell well. But you still need many more images up.
• Your captions are too short. They are searchable by clients, so try to make the most of the 150 characters available to you. See also:

  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

You've also got a specific date in at least 1 caption. This is a waste of time unless it's a live news image, or the image is of a particular event say. So no need to say when your Acropolis image was taken. 

• Ease up on the vignettes. Clients can add a vignette easily if they want one - much harder to remove. They can be artistic, but often are OTT. E.g.

 

• Keyword spamming (too many keywords / tags - although in your case, you just have too many irrelevant keywords)

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. Include British and American spellings - e.g. sidewalk / footpath, color / colour

• Sunset on the Gastineau Channel in Juneau, Alaska - Image ID: 2WD3AEP

You don't have Channel or Gastineau in the keywords. One reason why your images may not be showing up in searches.

 

Good luck,

Steve

 

[Martin L]

Bobby, I know you didn't ask for a critique but image 2TC8ME8 of the Government building has some pretty blown highlights.

That would generally be a QC fail but they obviously didn't check.

[VbFolly]

Your images are definitely showing up in searches. I just searched for Elred Rock Lighthouse. There are 7 images, 6 of which are yours.

[brahephotography]

On 25/03/2024 at 09:07, Steve F said:

Howdy Bobby. Some nice images there. 

 

If you want a more detailed review by the Forum, you can ask for one under 'Portfolio Critique'. But some quick comments:

• Main one - get more images up. Many more. Rough average for contributors is 1 sale per month per 1000 images. At this rate, going to take you years to make a sale. You can improve your sales by having good quality images of subjects that sell well. But you still need many more images up.
• Your captions are too short. They are searchable by clients, so try to make the most of the 150 characters available to you. See also:

  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

You've also got a specific date in at least 1 caption. This is a waste of time unless it's a live news image, or the image is of a particular event say. So no need to say when your Acropolis image was taken. 

• Ease up on the vignettes. Clients can add a vignette easily if they want one - much harder to remove. They can be artistic, but often are OTT. E.g.

 

• Keyword spamming (too many keywords / tags - although in your case, you just have too many irrelevant keywords)

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. Include British and American spellings - e.g. sidewalk / footpath, color / colour

• Sunset on the Gastineau Channel in Juneau, Alaska - Image ID: 2WD3AEP

You don't have Channel or Gastineau in the keywords. One reason why your images may not be showing up in searches.

 

Good luck,

Steve

 

Thanks, Steve!  I so greatly appreciate your advice and feedback.

[brahephotography]

19 hours ago, Martin L said:

Bobby, I know you didn't ask for a critique but image 2TC8ME8 of the Government building has some pretty blown highlights.

That would generally be a QC fail but they obviously didn't check.

Yes, I noticed that right away when I got to see it on my computer. I was surprised it passed QC, too! Thanks for your critique!

[Steve F]

4 minutes ago, brahephotography said:

I was surprised it passed QC, too

 

Alamy only spot check submissions; doesn't mean a particular image has passed QC as such.