Auto-reject the whole batch on photo submission?

[K Junos]

I am confused about rejection due to photo quality (soft or lacking definition)

Per email I received from Alamy, only 1 photo was rejected. This week I submitted 206 photos in multiple batches. I reviewed - all of them were rejected. I don't understand why the whole batch was rejected just because 1 photo was initially rejected. Not to be delusional, I have many great quality photos within the other batches.

 

I am currently unable to upload more photos because I am being frozen for 10 days.

This is the second time it happened to me this year. I have been submitting to Alamy since 2017 and I haven't seen this issue before.

 

Can someone please explain if you are able to change the review process and accepting good quality photos rather than rejecting the whole good batches?

Thank you in advance.

Edited May 15 by K Junos

[Steve F]

Hi Khairil,

Alamy only spot check your submissions and expect you to check every image you submit meets their quality guidelines:

https://www.alamy.com/contributors/alamy-how-to-pass-qc.pdf

 

It is a standard practice in industry that you are expected to do your own QC and a whole batch is rejected if a spot checked item doesn't meet the quality requirements. Not sure why you are confused, the process is stated quite clearly on Alamy's guidelines:

 

https://www.alamy.com/contributor/how-to-sell-images/alamy-quality-control/?section=5

 

"After your first submission has passed: 

• Check your submissions for technical faults before you submit 
• Send us as many images as you like as often as you like 
• We’ll just spot-check a few of your images per submission 
• If the images we check are ok, your whole submission will pass 
• If we find a problem with one image, your whole submission will fail 
• You’ll receive a pass or fail email and we’ll update the submission in AIM"

 

Short answer, don't fail QC. Many of us work with this process and pass QC regularly.

 

Nice photos by the way.

 

Good luck,

Stephen

[Steve F]

If you're not sure why the image was rejected, you can post a copy of the image at 100% here on the Forum and ask what people think.

[David eastley]

It has always been fail the sample check and the whole batch is rejected. We all have occasional rejects and it is why I normally upload in batches of 15-20 images

[Matt Ashmore]

I'm curious.. K Junos.. as of now you have 10613 images on Alamy uploaded since March 2017 which is not an insignificant number of images..... Is this your first failure? I'm surprised that how Alamy QC works is a surprise to you! Not too bad going if it is your first QC failure!

 

1 hour ago, David eastley said:

It has always been fail the sample check and the whole batch is rejected. We all have occasional rejects and it is why I normally upload in batches of 15-20 images

To be honest, I just upload everything that I have ready to upload in one go regardless of whether it is 5 or 105 images. If a batch does fail, my internet connection nowadays is fast enough to just upload everything again (with the offending image removed/corrected) and it be no big deal. When I started submitting to Alamy, I might have thought about splitting images into smaller batches though.

[Betty LaRue]

2 hours ago, Matt Ashmore said:

I'm curious.. K Junos.. as of now you have 10613 images on Alamy uploaded since March 2017 which is not an insignificant number of images..... Is this your first failure? I'm surprised that how Alamy QC works is a surprise to you! Not too bad going if it is your first QC failure!

 

To be honest, I just upload everything that I have ready to upload in one go regardless of whether it is 5 or 105 images. If a batch does fail, my internet connection nowadays is fast enough to just upload everything again (with the offending image removed/corrected) and it be no big deal. When I started submitting to Alamy, I might have thought about splitting images into smaller batches though.

True. It’s not as if we have to hoist 100 images onto our backs and hand feed them to Alamy one-by-one. Punch upload & walk away. Although those who have very low upload speed, I can understand the discouragement. I have always waited for one batch to clear before uploading the next, though, no matter the number of images in the batch. Although it really makes no difference whether one uploads a batch of 100 images or 10 batches with 10 in each. One fails, they all fail.

[Matt Ashmore]

2 hours ago, Betty LaRue said:

Although those who have very low upload speed, I can understand the discouragement. 

 Very true... FTTH (Fibre To The Home) was a real game changer as I now get 900Mb/s download and upload so even 100 images takes no more than a minute or two to upload.

[Sultanpepa]

Why do people never read Alamy's rules when joining. It's the first thing I did before submitting my initial upload.

Edited May 16 by Sultanpepa

[K Junos]

Thanks all for responding. It is my first failure.  Recently I uploaded ONLY 1 super sharp and clear closeup photo of an object taken by Sony A5600 camera to see if it will be accepted. After waiting for 2 weeks, it was rejected. I am about to give up. I will try one more time, with 1 more sharp photo. Hopefully it will be accepted. Otherwise, I will post it here to be judged

Also, I belong to 9 other agencies and uploaded using FTP. It is beyond impossible to come back and check which photos that were rejected from each agencies. I normally just 'let it go' and 'move on'. If this is how it's done here, then I will accept the way it is and move on

 

Thank you.

Edited June 13 by K Junos

[Inchiquin]

3 hours ago, K Junos said:

 

I will try one more time, with 1 more sharp photo. Hopefully it will be accepted. Otherwise, I will post it here to be judged

 

 

We're always happy to give a constructive opinion.

 

Alan

 

[jgr]

I just had an image rejected too for the very same reason "Soft or lacking definition".  Probably the same QC person?  Maybe somebody new?  It's my first rejection after more than 10 years at Alamy.

Now we all know that some parts of the image will not be in focus unless we focus stack the image, which we will only do very occasionally.  The image that was rejected was of the inside of a historic market hall in Budapest.  The main subjects were a couple walking to the right and the very famous roof of the building.  The couple were 10m away and in perfect focus as was the roof.  However, there is a much closer market stall to the left of the image which was of course "soft".  It was never intended to be in focus.  The image isn't about the market stall, it's about the people in the mid-ground and the roof. 

The QC person that failed my image has made a very big and bold assumption that the object closest to the camera should always be in focus, in which case I'm heading for an awful lot of submission failures in future! 

I'd post the image if I had it, but I left home for a week this morning and the image is on my other PC.