Thousands of pictures - Changed to - Sell for editorial only

[Harry Harrison]

6 minutes ago, Kent Johnson said:

All the 'normal pictures were changed to Editorial - all of them.

Thank you

 

7 minutes ago, Kent Johnson said:

and will decide if I will completely remove the shots with - shall we call it 'creative merit' or leave them in

Yes, you won't be alone, I imagine that many (most?) contributors who don't look at the forum, or keep up to date with Alamy blogs, haven't even realised the implications yet.

[Sally Robertson]

1 hour ago, spacecadet said:

 

You're in Australia. Your clock is 12 hours ahead.

 

Yes, but the "date taken" in AIM refers to the date and time the image was taken at a particular location. For example, I have images taken at the Margaret River Pro surfing event in April this year. It is problematic with an editorial image if the date does not match the date of the event, such as it shows the date certain competitors were competing that is actually wrong. It's like saying the opening ceremony of the Olympics occurred on a different date than it actually did in Paris. It changes back to the correct date once logged in. To me that doesn't make sense. It is especially illogical as the wrong date is showing here in Australia when logged out (where the event occurred) but the correct date shows when logged in.

 

On other stock sites I'm aware of you are required to put the date in the caption for editorial. In Alamy it is automatically shown in the Date Taken, except it is incorrect in terms of what buyers see if they are not logged in. It is not a huge deal in most cases but I feel it does become problematic if it is falsifying factual information to customers about specific events. A way around it is to put the correct date in the caption and delete the "date taken" field. 

 

Edit: On further investigation I thought it was resolved just now as some of the dates are showing as correct, but not the ones taken later in the day where the date given is still not the date of the event. Perth WA is 7 hours ahead of the UK yet the logged out version pushes Perth time even more ahead. It doesn't make sense but I give up now.

Edited August 26 by Sally Robertson

[John Mitchell]

8 hours ago, geogphotos said:

And this for ones that were not Restricted

 

 

 

Personal Use is still available. There is no 'Buy a Print' button,

 

Both screenshots on Safari. I'm in UK

 

I assume that nothing has changed as yet .

 

As mentioned earlier, sign out of both the Forum and the Alamy website, and clear your browser's cache. Then try an "anonymous" search, and you should see the "Buy the Print" button beneath your unrestricted images (along with the standard and enhanced licensing options). This is what I'm seeing, at least.

[Sally]

I’ve had to email Alamy about the changes. Most of my images did not allow Personal Use sales but since that is no longer allowed, I asked them to change all of them to allow Personal Use, otherwise those which could be commercial use would not be available for that purpose. Now I find that every image is restricted to editorial only, whether or not they have people or property in them. I always complete the optional section. A landscape, for example, or a flower, is showing as editorial only. What a pain.

Edited August 26 by Sally

[John Mitchell]

12 minutes ago, Sally said:

I’ve had to email Alamy about the changes. Most of my images did not allow Personal Use sales but since that is no longer allowed, I asked them to change all of them to allow Personal Use, otherwise those which could be commercial use would not be available for that purpose. Now I find that every image is restricted to editorial only, whether or not they have people or property in them. I always complete the optional section. A landscape, for example, or a flower, is showing as editorial only. What a pain.

 

Both my "commercial" and editorial images still have the PU option available for registered customers and the new "Buy the Print" button for e-commerce (i.e. unregistered) buyers. Mind you, Alamy appears to have made no changes to my collection yet.

Edited August 26 by John Mitchell

[IKuzmin]

Feel the same frustration as many on this topic. Spent a couple of hours upon receiving the notice, removing "Not for personal use" for many my images, via several iterations back-and-forth, as AIM always misses some images at one run so several iterations are needed. Then, after Alamy made the conversion, I discovered that many images still were listed as restricted, with the mark "Editorial only" or without an identification what the restriction was. Again several back-and-forth iterations to clean this up. After a couple of days opened the "Restricted images" again, and guess what I found? Yes, all over again, some same and some new images appeared "Editorial only".

Edited August 26 by IKuzmin

[Kent Johnson]

This is what it is all about - a Print shop, your copyright burnt to the ground for a couple of $$ - and they will take 80% too of my $$ at the moment. As a side note - this picture was nearly $300 (or was it 395) minimum sale price before this, and that included Personal Use/Print option. It's gone from $300/400 to $20 overnight!

Edited August 27 by Kent Johnson
details

[Kent Johnson]

To my mind, Alamy offering Prints for sale via their own print shop moves them from being my agent looking out for the best price, to a print retailer - without having to purchase the pictures to sell. It's a conflict of interest. A week ago lowest price on Alamy for a 360-degree panorama was  $300-400 now it's $20. The only reason I allowed Personal use on 360s was it was still a good price - this ability to control personal usage Via the buyers contract with Alamy has been stripped away. Once a prints high resolution file is contractually allowed to be used for personal printing, there is no way I can ever edition a print. While big $$ for an 'art' picture are always elusive, this change at Alamy makes any picture for sale here commercially unavailable for editioning - though genuine commercial use, like a billboard or an advert would have no impact on the ability to edition the same image.

 

How do I know the 'Editorial' images will not be sacrificed to the Print shop too, in the future, when my picture agent has a conflict of interest in the house.

Edited August 27 by Kent Johnson
typo

[Sally Robertson]

1 hour ago, Kent Johnson said:

To my mind, Alamy offering Prints for sale via their own print shop moves them from being my agent looking out for the best price, to a print retailer - without having to purchase the pictures to sell. It's a conflict of interest. A week ago lowest price on Alamy for a 360-degree panorama was  $300-400 now it's $20. The only reason I allowed Personal use on 360s was it was still a good price - this ability to control personal usage Via the buyers contract with Alamy has been stripped away. Once a prints high resolution file is contractually allowed to be used for personal printing, there is no way I can ever edition a print. While big $$ for an 'art' picture are always elusive, this change at Alamy makes any picture for sale here commercially unavailable for editioning - though genuine commercial use, like a billboard or an advert would have no impact on the ability to edition the same image.

 

How do I know the 'Editorial' images will not be sacrificed to the Print shop too, in the future, when my picture agent has a conflict of interest in the house.

 

My sense is that if you have images you want to have control over in relation to print sales, it is now best to keep them aside from stock. I started keeping aside some favourite wildlife and landscape images a little while ago to potentially direct to other projects (e.g. building a website, possible prints etc). It does seem it is sacrificial and a risk uploading certain images to Alamy if you want to retain control of their usage and licensing. I can see the Buy a Print option is through media storehouse.com  For those of my images that are currently available for print on Alamy, I cannot see them available as yet on the media storehouse website, but that may change. I am not opted in for distribution and never have been, but I did have an image license for distribution recently and Alamy have not gotten back to me yet as to how this happened even though I'm not opted in. In a way, the outsourcing to a printing company is like another form of distribution. I think the nature of the licensing agreement with Alamy is such that terms can change and it is unknown going forward how that will keep happening.

[geogphotos]

Alamy also loses out on commercial sales when images are switched to Editorial Only. I would imagine that those photographers with existing Fine Art print sales would be those most ready to switch their Alamy images away from the 'Buy a Print' option. Would these be photographers who have images of high commercial potential that Alamy will no longer be able to profit from?

 

It would have been more straightfoward for Alamy to make the MediaStorehouse deal an opt out on an image by image level while keeping images available for commercial use.

 

It doesn't affect me just thinking aloud.

Edited August 27 by geogphotos

[IKuzmin]

16 hours ago, IKuzmin said:

Feel the same frustration as many on this topic. Spent a couple of hours upon receiving the notice, removing "Not for personal use" for many my images, via several iterations back-and-forth, as AIM always misses some images at one run so several iterations are needed. Then, after Alamy made the conversion, I discovered that many images still were listed as restricted, with the mark "Editorial only" or without an identification what the restriction was. Again several back-and-forth iterations to clean this up. After a couple of days opened the "Restricted images" again, and guess what I found? Yes, all over again, some same and some new images appeared "Editorial only".

Today found again a bunch of "new" images (those that AIM did not show me as restricted last time) marked "Editorial only". It is getting more and more frustrating.

[Sally]

22 hours ago, Sally said:

I’ve had to email Alamy about the changes. Most of my images did not allow Personal Use sales but since that is no longer allowed, I asked them to change all of them to allow Personal Use, otherwise those which could be commercial use would not be available for that purpose. Now I find that every image is restricted to editorial only, whether or not they have people or property in them. I always complete the optional section. A landscape, for example, or a flower, is showing as editorial only. What a pain.

Alamy has told me that they are still working on the changes. A bit of information about the progress/timescales would be helpful. Meanwhile thousands of my images are not available for wider use.

Edited August 27 by Sally

[MB Photography]

This is getting ridiculous. I went back through a very large number of recent submissions (after the Alamy licence change) and removed the “Editorial Only” for all of my landscape images that had no property and no people.

 

This morning I noticed that every image had been put back to “Editorial Only”.

Edited September 3 by MB Photography
Clarification

[Harry Harrison]

2 hours ago, MB Photography said:

This morning I noticed that every image had been put back to “Editorial Only”.

I'd say it was more than ridiculous, what are you supposed to do now, is your time worth nothing to them or is it some kind of mistake that will be rectified? Alamy haven't posted in this thread, I wonder if you might get some kind of explanation if you posted in their own thread that introduced these changes. I'm sure we'd all be interested to hear what they say:

 

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/17869-alamys-new-licensing-model/

 

I actually stripped all of mine of any restriction as they were all prevented from being sold for Personal Use. Now I'm adding them back where I feel they are appropriate starting with the most obvious ones, so far the few that I have restricted have remained the only ones.

 

Edited September 3 by Harry Harrison

[MB Photography]

4 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

I'm sure we'd all be interested to hear what they say

Thanks for the suggestion. Just posted on the original thread to see if I get a response.

[M.Chapman]

Are you sure you waited long enough for the database to update? Updates have been a bit slow of late. I seem to recall that AIM can be quite confusing because some of the search and filter options work off the live database so that changes made in AIM may appear to have "disappeared" when they are just in the "pipeline" to be processed. I suggest making a change to the keyword or caption (to indicate which images you've processed) then you can check with an Alamy search (not in AIM) to check if the change has propagated into the database.

 

Mark

[Harry Harrison]

1 hour ago, M.Chapman said:

I seem to recall that AIM can be quite confusing because some of the search and filter options work off the live database

Yes, good point,  I was surprised to see that my changes to restrictions in AIM were reflected in the AIM search immediately.

[M.Chapman]

57 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

Yes, good point,  I was surprised to see that my changes to restrictions in AIM were reflected in the AIM search immediately.

Oh that's curious. I just tried it too. Although saved changes to keywords don't affect AIM search results straight-away (have to wait for the database update), changes to the "Sell for Editorial Only" setting are treated differently and affect the results of the AIM "Restricted Images" filter straight-away. I wonder if changes to restrictions in AIM affect customer search results straight-away and how the OP was checking if their changes had been implemented?

 

Mark

Edited September 3 by M.Chapman