MircoV Posted January 4, 2015 Share Posted January 4, 2015 Hello fellow contributors, I just read in one Alamy blog article that in the future there could be the possibility of an app in a DSLR camera that let us be able to upload directly from camera to Alamy. I am curious what is still in plan in short therms ..... waiting waiting. Mirco Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Yarvin Posted January 4, 2015 Share Posted January 4, 2015 Micro (Mike?): I myself wouldn't use such a feature for a bunch of reasons. I want to address the waiting time business though. I find that the wait to get images up on Alamy to be amazingly short. No other agency I deal with is remotely close. Since I almost never see sales from images that haven't been on sale at least a few months, I must conclude that what counts is always having new work in the pipeline, not whether it gets through the pipeline a week or two faster. While we wait for the future, we really need to remember to upload images that clients will find useful. Not what we feel like shooting, but what end users want to publish. There is no technology at all involved in doing this. Just hard work. That part doesn't change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted January 4, 2015 Share Posted January 4, 2015 Oh boy, can you imagine the flood of images that would inundate Alamy with such an app. Also, there would probably be a huge spike in the number of QC failures. Judging the technical quality of photos in-camera is iffy at best. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin P Wilson Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 As John say that app would have repercussions. It would certainly cause Alamy to innovate, probably to block such submissionm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MircoV Posted January 5, 2015 Author Share Posted January 5, 2015 We will see.... we never know what changes. Maybe on that time cameras will have much better screens so checking quality will be much easier. About floot of images there would be no problem if keywording is done good. Alamy has one of the best search engines in the industry. If we will use it right inrellevant images will not show up. I know that i am not the best example since my English could be better . Lets take an example of an subject what would be almost nobody interested in... a table corner. If you would use keywording right it should never disturb buyers since it should only show up if a buyer is actually looking for an table corner. If you put the keyword TABLE splitted from CORNER then every time when a buyer looks for an table he will get table corners included in the search results. This can be frustrating. But if you would change the keywording to "TABLE CORNER" then the image will only show up if a buyer enters these exact words. So the image is only open for these buyers. If everyone keywords with this thinking then uploading all different kind of stuff even unpopular ones should not be a problem. Maybe this stuff doesnt sell well but if a client will find such unpopular image here after trying other agencies it will be only a extra sale for us and a happy client. I think that is one thing that makes Alamy difference from other agencies. Good search engine with depth of subjects what you can not find anywhere else. Mirco Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin P Wilson Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 I don't agree about Alamy having a class leading search engine or your example. I have a problem for example with pictures I took of the author Stephen Booth whose books are about two detectives, Cooper and Fry. Alamy shows his picture in searches for Stephen Fry despite the Fry only appearing in the caption. Alamy desperately NEEDS to implement key phrases though use of "" to reduce false results from search searches. I have countless other examples of inappropriate results from properly keyworded images. I do use "" in the hope that one day ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MircoV Posted January 5, 2015 Author Share Posted January 5, 2015 I don't agree about Alamy having a class leading search engine or your example. I have a problem for example with pictures I took of the author Stephen Booth whose books are about two detectives, Cooper and Fry. Alamy shows his picture in searches for Stepehen Fry despite the Fry only appearing in the caption. Alamy desperately NEEDS to implement key phrases though use of "" to reduce false results from search searches. I have countless other examples of inappropriate results from properly keyworded images. I do use "" in the hope that one day ... Hello Martin, I didnt know that the practice is different. Thanks for your info. I will need to try it out. Mirco Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 Alamy desperately NEEDS to implement key phrases though use of "" to reduce false results from search searches. I strongly disagree. Nobody in the industry uses that. It's very simple: everything between commas or semicolons is a keyword or key phrase. No other punctuation marks required. All software that can keyword works like this. wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 Wim, I don't quite understand what you are saying. Do you mean that Alamy should make commas or semicolons useful to keep a phrase together? Right now there is no way for us to do that. If we use " " the words stay together in the preview but we still get false results when searching. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin P Wilson Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 Alamy desperately NEEDS to implement key phrases though use of "" to reduce false results from search searches. I strongly disagree. Nobody in the industry uses that. It's very simple: everything between commas or semicolons is a keyword or key phrase. No other punctuation marks required. All software that can keyword works like this. wim Point accepted but we need keyphrases! But Alamy for some obscure reason uniquely, and known only to them have used the space as keyword delimiter! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 Wim, I don't quite understand what you are saying. Do you mean that Alamy should make commas or semicolons useful to keep a phrase together? Right now there is no way for us to do that. If we use " " the words stay together in the preview but we still get false results when searching. Paulette Have a look at how all the others including Photoshop and Lightroom organize keywords: everything is one keyword or key phrase that is between two commas or semicolons. With Alamy there is a comma or semicolon between each word. Because they strip out all punctuation marks, and put in their own. Like Martin says: Alamy somehow has space as a delimiter in stead of a punctuation mark. (It's a bit technical, but accurate.) wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 Martin P Wilson, on 05 Jan 2015 - 1:39 PM, said: wiskerke, on 05 Jan 2015 - 1:29 PM, said: Martin P Wilson, on 05 Jan 2015 - 10:16 AM, said: Alamy desperately NEEDS to implement key phrases though use of "" to reduce false results from search searches. I strongly disagree. Nobody in the industry uses that. It's very simple: everything between commas or semicolons is a keyword or key phrase. No other punctuation marks required. All software that can keyword works like this. wim Point accepted but we need keyphrases! But Alamy for some obscure reason uniquely, and known only to them have used the space as keyword delimiter! After first stripping out the existing punctuation. Except for one that seems to escape that. Some agencies, maybe even only one, use something like | in stead of space. Alamy strips the punctuation and puts in colons, but leaves the | in place. Not sure if it still works this way because we cannot see metadata any more. Also not sure if it made any difference in searches. I just noticed the use of |. Not sure if it really was |. It could have been some character or code that just shows up as | or | in Windows. Personally I think the fear of punishment is exaggerated. Maybe if this particular fault is like 30% of your views. Maybe try to do some counting of all your views that do not result in a zoom. Oh, wait, that CTR of course. ;-) So we actually would need a different measurement: it's the right image for the keyword, but the client doesn't want it anyway. Hmm that would require knowledge in stead of information. That's where we humans are still needed. My stats for 2014: Collection roughly 1800 on sale; 98,000 views; 504 zooms; 185 sales. That means over 500 views for 1 sale. Including lots and lots of results with the right keywords, but the wrong content for the client. From time to time I do cull some keywords because of that. Like sexy (lots of unnecessary views). Even for a small collection of mine the result of that is unnoticeable. (Clients may also ask the wrong question. Maybe very often even.) What worries me more is that my zooms went a bit up, but my sales (slightly) down. That is a bad sign: I noticed that people that report really good results here on the forum, usually also report a very low zoom to sales ratio. Meaning that when a client does zoom an image he/she often likes it and buys it. I don't think that has anything to do with keywords that have been wrongly interpreted by the search engine. It has to do with content clients look for, photographed the way clients want it. wim edit: color Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin P Wilson Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 Contributors with low zooms but good sales: Perhaps the client only really uses zooms to check "why on earth...?" an image turned up on that search or to confirm it is not right for their purpose. Perhaps more often it is obvious from the mouseover that it is right; it jumps out as "the one". The best controbutors have cracked getting that impact into their work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 We will see.... we never know what changes. Maybe on that time cameras will have much better screens so checking quality will be much easier. About floot of images there would be no problem if keywording is done good. Alamy has one of the best search engines in the industry. If we will use it right inrellevant images will not show up. I know that i am not the best example since my English could be better . Lets take an example of an subject what would be almost nobody interested in... a table corner. If you would use keywording right it should never disturb buyers since it should only show up if a buyer is actually looking for an table corner. If you put the keyword TABLE splitted from CORNER then every time when a buyer looks for an table he will get table corners included in the search results. This can be frustrating. But if you would change the keywording to "TABLE CORNER" then the image will only show up if a buyer enters these exact words. So the image is only open for these buyers. If everyone keywords with this thinking then uploading all different kind of stuff even unpopular ones should not be a problem. Maybe this stuff doesnt sell well but if a client will find such unpopular image here after trying other agencies it will be only a extra sale for us and a happy client. I think that is one thing that makes Alamy difference from other agencies. Good search engine with depth of subjects what you can not find anywhere else. Mirco Mirco, I was under the impression that quotation marks don't work on Alamy. I stopped using them in my keywords a couple of years ago, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 We will see.... we never know what changes. Maybe on that time cameras will have much better screens so checking quality will be much easier. About floot of images there would be no problem if keywording is done good. Alamy has one of the best search engines in the industry. If we will use it right inrellevant images will not show up. I know that i am not the best example since my English could be better . Lets take an example of an subject what would be almost nobody interested in... a table corner. If you would use keywording right it should never disturb buyers since it should only show up if a buyer is actually looking for an table corner. If you put the keyword TABLE splitted from CORNER then every time when a buyer looks for an table he will get table corners included in the search results. This can be frustrating. But if you would change the keywording to "TABLE CORNER" then the image will only show up if a buyer enters these exact words. So the image is only open for these buyers. If everyone keywords with this thinking then uploading all different kind of stuff even unpopular ones should not be a problem. Maybe this stuff doesnt sell well but if a client will find such unpopular image here after trying other agencies it will be only a extra sale for us and a happy client. I think that is one thing that makes Alamy difference from other agencies. Good search engine with depth of subjects what you can not find anywhere else. Mirco Mirco, I was under the impression that quotation marks don't work on Alamy. I stopped using them in my keywords a couple of years ago, One of the other threads has also wandered into this territory. The quotation marks "work" to put the words together in the zoom but they don't help with searches. We still get incorrect results because the words are not tied together. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jill Morgan Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 An app such as this would be great for News, but not for stock as you can't look as your photo at 100%. I would assume that would be the purpose of the app. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Robinson Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 I can see the benefit for news pictures, though adding lengthy captions and keywords in-camera would be fun Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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