Contributor images - behaviour changed?

[Inchiquin]

When I click on Images below my name on the forum, I used to get everything pretty much in the order of upload, most recent uploads first. Now they seem to appear in a fairly random order, a few from one batch then a few from another and so on. This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but what's worse is that if I scroll through a few pages I see the same images appear more than once. This surely can't be right? If I have 5190 images uploaded and some are duplicated, which ones are missing from the display? And does the same thing happen if customers search my images?

 

Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

 

Alan

[Alex Ramsay]

The default random order is marked as 'relevant', though what this means is anyone's guess. The only alternative is to view them in order of the date they were taken, newest or oldest first. It's sadly no longer possible to view them in order of upload (except of course in Image Manager)

 

Alex

[Alexander Hogg]

It's all mixed up as well 

[Harry Harrison]

Mark Chapman provided a fix back in an older thread, it requires you to alter the very end of the URL so that you remove 'datetaken-' to get this:

 

&sortBy=newest&st=12

 

So for Alan's images it would be this. Then bookmark that URL.

 

Does this still work? Pretty sure images shouldn't be duplicated though, and this fix would only work for us and not the potential buyer.

Edited September 12 by Harry Harrison

[Martin L]

14 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

Does this still work? Pretty sure images shouldn't be duplicated though, and this fix would only work for us and not the potential buyer.

Yep and no duplicates 

[Inchiquin]

21 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

Mark Chapman provided a fix back in an older thread, it requires you to alter the very end of the URL so that you remove 'datetaken-' to get this:

&sortBy=newest&st=12

 

 

That's very interesting for two reasons. Firstly I don't see "datetaken" anywhere in the URL when I click on it. Secondly, "sortBy=newest" may be a red herring, because the link I created a while ago for my own website (see below) has "sortBy=relevant" and that shows them in upload order exactly as the forum link used to do.

 

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/*.html?imgt=0&qn=alanwrigley&sortBy=relevant

 

Alan

[Harry Harrison]

22 minutes ago, Inchiquin said:

 

That's very interesting for two reasons. Firstly I don't see "datetaken" anywhere in the URL when I click on it

Firsly I should have said '-datetaken' rather than 'datetaken-'.

 

If you mean the link that I provided then that is because I have removed '-datetaken' so that it instead shows images by 'date uploaded' though obviously only you can confirm this. Using the Newest' filter on Alamy always puts '-datetaken-' back in right at the end so the only way is to bookmark the URL as I did. The difference seems to be the image of Tioga Lake, California, which appears first but is an archive image from 2006? If you select 'Newest' then it disappears to goodness knows where.

[Inchiquin]

10 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

 

If you mean the link that I provided then that is because I have removed '-datetaken' so that it instead shows images by 'date uploaded'

 

 

No, I mean the URL I get when I click on 5189 below my name. There is no reference to datetaken. The URL has the following parameters:

_gl= <loads of ASCII characters>

cid= <loads more ASCII characters>

comp=1

mode=0

name=Alan+Wrigley

sortBy=relevant

st=12

 

Alan

 

[Martin L]

33 minutes ago, Inchiquin said:

 

No, I mean the URL I get when I click on 5189 below my name. There is no reference to datetaken. The URL has the following parameters:

_gl= <loads of ASCII characters>

cid= <loads more ASCII characters>

comp=1

mode=0

name=Alan+Wrigley

sortBy=relevant

st=12

 

Alan

 

Change the filter at the top from 'Relevant' to 'Newest' that will change 

sortBy=relevant

to

sortBy=newest-datetaken&st=12

 

Then remove the '-datetaken' bit as Harry said to get

 

sortBy=newest&st=12

 

Bookmark that page and (🤞 ) voila

Edited September 13 by Martin L
Added

[M.Chapman]

 

[Harry Harrison]

9 hours ago, Inchiquin said:

sortBy=relevant

st=12

Sorry if I'm not being clear, Alamy have made the default search for everyone, buyers incuded, 'Relevant' so that's what you see first. Alamy have also changed the algorithm for Relevant to something quite mysterious that in general dredges up old images and mixes them with new ones. Still in order to see your images sorted by 'Date uploaded' you had to select 'Newest' in the dropdown at top right - but that search has now been changed to sort by 'Date taken' and not 'Date uploaded'. A lot of people in the other thread were disappointed at this change as before it was an easy way to look at their most recently uploaded batches. So you need to rig the URL in the way Mark suggested but in the link that I provided I have done that for you.

Edited September 14 by Harry Harrison

[Inchiquin]

OK, I get it now. Clicking on my images brings up the search in Relevant, and I have to change the filter to Newest before removing the -datetaken. That wasn't made clear.

 

To be honest I'm not that bothered. I was mainly curious, especially about the duplication of some images.

 

Alan

 

[Robert M Estall]

I just had a look at how my portfolio presents and to be honest, the first few pages seem to be an improvement. They have moved some of my more interesting historic images foreward. I tend to not have long runs of similars anyway, but it's good to have things spread about. Too early to think about how this may affect sales

 

[Sally Robertson]

1 hour ago, Inchiquin said:

OK, I get it now. Clicking on my images brings up the search in Relevant, and I have to change the filter to Newest before removing the -datetaken. That wasn't made clear.

 

To be honest I'm not that bothered. I was mainly curious, especially about the duplication of some images.

 

Alan

 

 

Hi Alan, I think the duplication is simply that the images keep being reshuffled. So they are all still there but as they reshuffle you might see the same image again as you navigate to the next page, which is a bit disorientating and confusing. If a customer wanted to look at your images in particular, unless they select Newest they will see the Relevant display, and could technically never see certain images because of the reshuffling. But as this is not usually how customers are searching it probably doesn't usually matter.

[Inchiquin]

5 hours ago, Sally Robertson said:

 

But as this is not usually how customers are searching it probably doesn't usually matter.

 

 

Maybe not, but it's a bit disconcerting to know that you might have the perfect picture for the customer but it doesn't get seen 😒. Doesn't seem to me like a very good way to do it.

 

Alan

[Sally Robertson]

7 hours ago, Inchiquin said:

 

Maybe not, but it's a bit disconcerting to know that you might have the perfect picture for the customer but it doesn't get seen 😒. Doesn't seem to me like a very good way to do it.

 

Alan

I agree. I preferred how it was before. Probably most customers won’t be browsing our image collection as a whole, or if they do will hopefully select Newest, but not all may even notice the drop down menu for that.

[Avpics]

The order options now offer: 

Relevant

Most recently uploaded

Newest date taken

Oldest date taken

 

 

[eclectic]

So does this mean our 'ranking' is not so important? The searches based on 'most recently uploaded, newest and oldest date' will seem to dispense with any search returns based on how high our images may or may not be.

 

Is the seeming drop in zooms linked I wonder? CTR being not so important. Maybe 'relevant' will be based on how well we caption and tag images? (Subject of recent Alamy webinar) Or something else? 

Edited September 27 by eclectic
Additional text added

[VbFolly]

3 hours ago, eclectic said:

So does this mean our 'ranking' is not so important? The searches based on 'most recently uploaded, newest and oldest date' will seem to dispense with any search returns based on how high our images may or may not be.

 

Is the seeming drop in zooms linked I wonder? CTR being not so important. Maybe 'relevant' will be based on how well we caption and tag images? (Subject of recent Alamy webinar) Or something else? 

The default for searches is still 'Relevant', so ranking will still be important for most searches.

[Matt Ashmore]

I can see why you would want to give customers the option to list by most recently uploaded/taken (which I would guess in the most part to be the same). But what this also tells me is that revisiting scenes and subjects that you have photographed before is an even more valid thing to do that it was before.

[Avpics]

3 hours ago, Matt Ashmore said:

I can see why you would want to give customers the option.......

These are our own portfolios, and the option for recently uploaded I find very useful in confirming that the previous day's work has, or hasn't, updated on the database. It's unrelated to the customer-facing search engine, unless I presume if they searched an individual pseudonym.

[Matt Ashmore]

21 minutes ago, Avpics said:

These are our own portfolios, and the option for recently uploaded I find very useful in confirming that the previous day's work has, or hasn't, updated on the database. It's unrelated to the customer-facing search engine, unless I presume if they searched an individual pseudonym.

No.. this change is on customer-facing search engjne. 

[Avpics]

So it is, my apologies. I was concentrating on the thread title referencing just the portfolios.

[Harry Harrison]

Is the 'small thumbnails' option new as well, haven't noticed it before.

[Harry Harrison]

12 hours ago, eclectic said:

So does this mean our 'ranking' is not so important? The searches based on 'most recently uploaded, newest and oldest date' will seem to dispense with any search returns based on how high our images may or may not be.

If I was a buyer looking for images I think I would prefer to sort by 'Newest date taken' once I'd noticed that the option was there. The 'Relevant' search is really quite odd.