Alamy's New licensing Model

[Alamy]

Hi Everyone,

 

Today we're announcing a new change to how you will soon only be able to make your images available for either:

 

- Editorial Only Use

- All Uses (both editorial and commercial)

 

You can read about the changes and how this might affect your images here: https://www.alamy.com/blog/alamys-new-licensing-model

 

This thread has been set up to support with any thoughts or queries about the new licensing model.

 

Thanks

 

Contributor Relations Team

[geogphotos]

First thoughts:

 

1) Will it still the responsibility of the client how the image is used if it does not have releases? Or are we supposed to decide if an image should be Editorial Only if it does not have releases?

 

2) Will the search engine page be adapted to encompass these two new licenses? - at the moment there is a lot of confusion. Selecting editorial brings up News not Editorial Only. 

 

3) What does Creative mean and how's it different from Commercial?

 

4) How does the change relate to Standard and Enhanced license?

 

5) Is it no longer possible to opt out of Personal Use?

Edited July 30 by geogphotos

[Sally]

My images are either editorial only or available for anything except personal use. As i understand it, the latter would be moved to editorial only, which is not sensible for the vast majority. How can I easily (with a relatively large portfolio) make the latter non-editorial?

[Alex Ramsay]

12 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

First thoughts:

 

1) Will it still the responsibility of the client how the image is used if it does not have releases? Or are we supposed to decide if an image should be Editorial Only if it does not have releases?

 

 

 

Agreed - for our own protection we need to have Alamy's position on releases made absolutely clear. And like Sally, above, nearly all my images are unreleased but available for anything except personal use. I can see my sales being cut in half by this move.

 

Alex

Edited July 30 by Alex Ramsay
additional thought

[Harry Harrison]

"The stock photo industry is extremely competitive, and we’ve identified the need to adapt as a business to reflect the more simplified way customers want to use and license images today. The main benefit of making the process more streamlined for all our customers is that having clearer terms will give them more confidence to license the images according to how they want to use them, therefore boosting conversion rates."

 

What will the prospective customer actually see though? Will they be directed to the importance of model & property releases and will the status of an image in this respect still display to them as it does currently?

 

Presumably the rates that they will be charged will differ according to how they want to use them, personal over commercial use for example? How will this be explained to them? Surely that isn't simple much as you'd like them to believe that it is.

 

How will contributors with tens of thousands of images on Alamy be able to find their images in AIM that are about to be summarily removed from Alamy?

 

 

Edited July 30 by Harry Harrison

[Alamy]

Hi Everyone,

 

In answer to your questions:

 

@geogphotos :

1. It's always been the responsibility of the customer but they will get a warning that they might need releases if it's not restricted and they select the commercial licences. For restricted images only they will have to sign a warrant (online). We'd advise contributors to continue to be diligent about adding an editorial only restriction where prudent to, but the end use is always the client responsibility. There's a link within the blog to help consider whether you want to make your images available for Editorial Only or All Uses.

 

2 and 3. Search engine pages works to show 'Creative' as meaning images here are available for commercial uses. Editorial filter does show editorial (not news) images, but it defaults to 'Newest' which means that in many cases it may be more likely that 'news' images appear.

 

4. The change will not affect Standard and Enhanced licensing (as above, customer will be warned about the extra steps needed if they try to license outside of a restricted image)

 

5. You cannot 'opt out' of Personal Use anymore - this would be seen as a 'commercial' use (along with Advertising & Promotion and Consumer Goods). If you make your images available for All Uses (both commercial and editorial) then there will be a 'buy the print' button under those images where customers can purchase a physical print of the image. In essence, there will no longer a 'Personal Use' option for the customer

@Sally and @Alex Ramsay - if you want to change the restriction on a set of images available for you can inform contributor relations contributors@alamy.com in advance informing them of the current restriction (e.g. currently restricted for PU) and what new use you would like to be applied (e.g. All Uses). We can then make these changes for you.

 

@Harry Harrison yes as above, the customer will be given lots of guidance in understanding in the process of how they license an image depending on their project. Customers will be choosing a license based on whether their use is editorial or commercial, we believe this will result in a higher conversion of sales especially with regard to our e-commerce customers.

 

It's a relatively small number of contributors who will be affected by making this change and we will be emailing all of them to ask them the new restrictions they want to be applied, once confirmed their images will be back on sale. It was done this way to ensure the smoothest transition possible in moving over to the new model.

 

Thanks

 

Sophie

[Avpics]

I'd already noticed and mentioned elsewhere that my PU licences which were once a regular and useful income had dropped off and an email response from CR now makes more sense as it seemed to infer a change was incoming. Another formerly popular market for Alamy contributors like myself was calendar licences, and I guess it's safe to assume that these will also not return being that they obviously fall into the consumer goods label. The retail shop displays are full of unreleased published subjects such as aircraft and vehicles so can @Alamy please confirm whether such sales would no longer be possible from the Alamy portfolio please?

[Harry Harrison]

37 minutes ago, Alamy said:

then there will be a 'buy the print' button under those images where customers can purchase a physical print of the image.

That's quite a big development isn't it? All non-Editorial images will be for sale as a print, in different sizes presumably, or am I not understanding that correctly?

I dropped out of Personal Use when a buyer got a full high res file in order to produce their own print, will that no longer be possible for them to do? I've never been comfortable with customers getting high res files very cheaply so this could be better. On the other hand contributors who already have a way of selling their own prints wil need to consider their options if those images are also on Alamy.

[Harry Harrison]

Will the Ultimate, Vital, Uncut & Foundation 'Creative' collections remain the same? Currently an image with no models and no property, and so no releases, will only go into Vital if the contributor has actually entered that information in AIM, rather than relying on the default which is displayed below the image indicating 'No' for releases.

Edited July 30 by Harry Harrison

[Lynchpics]

Is this really a big change? If there is property / people etc in your images that you do not have releases for then it can only be licensed as editorial, was that not always the case? 

[Allan Bell]

In some instances this is going to be difficult to categorise our images as it is not always possible to decide weather an image should have a release and sits between editorial and commercial.

 

Allan

 

[geogphotos]

I have some pictures of modern artworks for which I do not have Property Releases. 

 

Should these be Editorial Only or can I remove restrictions and let them be available for All Uses ie) the buyer will have to decide?

 

Can I really make them available for All Uses knowing that they should not be used to 'sell stuff'?

 

 

[Jansos]

3 hours ago, Alamy said:

Today we're announcing a new change to how you will soon only be able to make your images available for either:

 

- Editorial Only Use

- All Uses (both editorial and commercial)

Does this mean we will have to go back and reclassify all of our existing images or is it from this date onwards? The former would be a massive, if not impossible/impractical, task.

[Sally Robertson]

17 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

I have some pictures of modern artworks for which I do not have Property Releases. 

 

Should these be Editorial Only or can I remove restrictions and let them be available for All Uses ie) the buyer will have to decide?

 

Can I really make them available for All Uses knowing that they should not be used to 'sell stuff'?

 

 

 

My sense Ian is that it would be wise to make it Editorial Only as, although the customer gets a warning about restrictions, if they don't adhere to it, you are definitively covered in that it was marked editorial only if any complicated legal issues arise out of how the image is used.

 

Overall I think streamlining into these two categories is probably a good thing. I was briefly with a microstock agency where it was very clear that an image is available as either all uses (commercial and editorial) or strictly editorial. You had to specify at the time of upload and your image would be rejected if the reviewer saw it as potentially editorial only material going through the all uses route. By making this change, Alamy are more in line with what other stock agencies are doing, as far as I'm aware. To me it was always a bit of a vague, grey area that you could indicate there are no releases but not necessarily tick the editorial only box. I have sometimes felt confused about the best way to proceed with images in this grey area. So I will be erring on the side of caution and going for editorial only with anything where its commercial use potential is in doubt.

[geogphotos]

4 minutes ago, Sally Robertson said:

 

My sense Ian is that it would be wise to make it Editorial Only as, although the customer gets a warning about restrictions, if they don't adhere to it, you are definitively covered in that it was marked editorial only if any complicated legal issues arise out of how the image is used.

 

 

 

I have tried to do that but have probably forgotten at times.

 

I don't know how I can search for which images of mine have 'art' or 'artwork' and which do not have restrictions set. 

 

I have 87k images to look through so not really possible. 

 

 

[Sally Robertson]

1 minute ago, geogphotos said:

 

I have tried to do that but have probably forgotten at times.

 

I don't know how I can search for which images of mine have 'art' or 'artwork' and which do not have restrictions set. 

 

I have 87k images to look through so not really possible. 

 

 

 

Yes, I empathise, I can see that is hard to do. If you think the bulk of your images are editorial only material you could have them all converted as editorial only and then work backwards to lift that restriction on those that aren't. But I realise that still may be really cumbersome depending on what's in your collection and take a very long time to do. It is much easier for me with my small collection.

 

If you have put the tags "art" or "artwork" you will be able to search that way though. I just did it for mine. I went to the top of my most recent page and put "art" into the search box, and only images with that tag appeared. So that may work, depending on the keywords you have used.

[geogphotos]

1 minute ago, Sally Robertson said:

 

Yes, I empathise, I can see that is hard to do. If you think the bulk of your images are editorial only material you could have them all converted as editorial only and then work backwards to lift that restriction on those that aren't. But I realise that still may be really cumbersome depending on what's in your collection and take a very long time to do. It is much easier for me with my small collection.

 

If you have put the tags "art" or "artwork" you will be able to search that way though. I just did it for mine. I went to the top of my most recent page and put "art" into the search box, and only images with that tag appeared. So that may work, depending on the keywords you have used.

 

 

Yes, good idea. Have done that and I found a few.

 

I would like to have my pics available for print sales so won't go down the Editorial Only route for all.

 

No doubt all this will settle down.

[Sally Robertson]

Just now, geogphotos said:

 

 

Yes, good idea. Have done that and I found a few.

 

I would like to have my pics available for print sales so won't go down the Editorial Only route for all.

 

No doubt all this will settle down.

 

That is a good thought. I need to think about possible print images too.

[Harry Harrison]

In my opinion it needs extra 'Attributes' filters in AIM to show which images are:

Sell for Editorial only

Don't sell for advertising and promotion

Don't sell for consumer goods

Don't sell for editorial

Don't sell for personal use including single copy, non-retail wall art prints

 

In other words for each of the current restrictions, and combinations of the same.

 

Currently there is just the single 'Restricted images'. Not much to ask is it?

[Harry Harrison]

Presumably an email will be sent out to all contributors explaining this.

[Martyn]

I'm not sure if I'm missing something here ( which wouldn't surprise me ! ) but if those of us that have filled in the non obligatory section in AIM with no to either or both model release / property release but not ticked the box saying editorial only, surely it can't be too difficult to sweep the system and mark those that have one or neither releases as editorial only ?

[Allan Bell]

I would prefer all my images were put into "All Uses".

 

Allan

 

[Alamy]

Hi All

 

@Avpics yes customers will still want to buy images for calendars, though this would likely fall under needing a 'commercial' license, so there is nothing to stop them from licensing images in the same way as before.

 

@Harry Harrison the 'buy the print' function does not allow download of a high res file, but instead takes customer through to a page where they can buy products that feature the print. Yes the Ultimate, Vital, Uncut and Foundation collections are remaining the same as they function now which is as a filter for customers to find the relevant style of content more quickly.

 

@Lynchpics and @Allan Bell - All the same advice applies as before in considering whether your images are editorial or commercial. We're just removing specific types of commercial licenses at a granular level, so that in a broader sense all those restrictions (Advertising & Promotion, Consumer Goods, Personal Use) were always considered 'commercial' uses. So in essence a similar logic can be applied in thinking about whether images are available for commercial use.

 

@geogphotos - Direct images of 2D artworks if they are out of copyright won't need a property release, and needing a property release really depends on different contexts when it comes to art. It would naturally follow that images that are currently editorial only (or editorial and personal use only) stay (or move to) with being editorial only. 

 

@Jansos - The changes are being made over the next fortnight, but you if you want to change the restriction on a set of images, you can inform contributor relations contributors@alamy.com in advance informing them of the current restriction (e.g. currently restricted for PU) and what new use you would like to be applied (e.g. All Uses). We can then make these changes for you.

 

@Martyn - Unfortunately this doesn't fix the issue as several contributors have images that are ok for commercial use, but haven't filled in the PR and MR section either way. Some also have a mix of commercial and editorial uses in different combination and we need to be sure that there isn't some other reason that they have wanted to license for Advertising, but not Consumer Goods for example, so we need to check this.

 

Thanks,

 

Sophie

[Avpics]

7 minutes ago, Alamy said:

 

@Avpics yes customers will still want to buy images for calendars, though this would likely fall under needing a 'commercial' license, so there is nothing to stop them from licensing images in the same way as before.

Sophie

Hi Sophie. I'll avoid linking to any particular suppliers, but a simple scan around any shop with a range of calendars on display will illustrate that the majority consist of property which won't have releases and which Alamy will not be a source of images. The publishers were presumably happy to take on the responsibility of using unreleased images but going forward I assume they will no longer have the option of purchasing those images for such use?

[Martyn]

16 minutes ago, Alamy said:

 

 

@Martyn - Unfortunately this doesn't fix the issue as several contributors have images that are ok for commercial use, but haven't filled in the PR and MR section either way. Some also have a mix of commercial and editorial uses in different combination and we need to be sure that there isn't some other reason that they have wanted to license for Advertising, but not Consumer Goods for example, so we need to check this.

 

Thanks,

 

Sophie

 

I understand what you are saying but ... for those of us that have filled out the release boxes, yes or no, then if either of those releases have been marked as no, then they should automatically be editorial use only anyway ... I really hope that you don't expect us to go through all of our images, 13000 + in my case, just to tick the editorial only box ?