How to find my photos in the wild

[tdphotography]

Hi all,

I've tried the usual culprits to attempt to find usage of my sold editorial photos out in the real world. Clearly I'm not doing something right because I haven't found any of the few I've sold. I noticed various posts in forums where observant members identify Alamy photos used in publications. Is this the only way?

[Marianne]

Try tineye and google image search. You can also search for your name and Alamy in an advanced google search, leaving out alamy.com in the advanced search parameters. You can also set up a google alert for your name/Alamy. 

 

Since our names often aren't credited, you can also do an advanced google search (again leaving out "alamy.com") and search for alamy and some of the most important keywords in your sold images. 

 

I once was out shopping with my daughter many years ago and found one of my images on the cover of a puzzle; another time I was on a tour bus in St. Petersburg, Russia and saw a friend's image on several billboards, so let her know when I got home. Searching is generally more productive. 

[Sally]

I echo everything that Marianne has said. If you can be bothered, look at the publications most likely to use your images (eg I look at the Scottish versions of newspapers) on Pressreader which you can get free access to if your local library signs up to it. Many magazines available, too. But that’s very time consuming. You can also use an online tracking service such as Copytrack (others are available). I upload Live News photos, those that have been zoomed and any that I’ve got on other websites which could have inadvertently or deliberately been copied. I’ve had a lot of uses turn up which haven’t been identified by other means. You’ll need to check any uses with Alamy first and report possible infringements. Again, pretty time consuming. 

[M.Chapman]

Another trick is to dream up an Alamy Pseudonym that doesn't give any hits on Google and then use it for new images. Then, if an image is published with a credit line, it's easier to find by doing a Google search for the Pseudonym. After a while, to exclude usages already seen, restrict the date range to Last Month or Year. It's also possible to set up Google alerts to send an email when a new usage is found, but I forget how I did it.

 

Mark

[tdphotography]

Hey, I appreciate everyone's input. To be clear, I wasn't looking for infringement, just the actual publication of my sold editorial work. I tried what was suggested and came up with nothing so far. Perhaps usage of my few sales have eluded the web crawlers so far. The most helpful suggestion was excluding alamy.com from searches. Thanks for that!

 

 

[Avpics]

Also https://books.google.com/ for book licences.