M.Chapman Posted January 21, 2016 Share Posted January 21, 2016 I tried some tests too. I can't fathom the basis on which Alamy selects the similars at all. It feels more luck a "lucky dip?" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jill Morgan Posted January 21, 2016 Share Posted January 21, 2016 I think they are based on the keywords of the selected image. Finds images that have the most common keywords. All I know is that my zooms this month have been huge. So if that is because of my images showing under other people's zooms, great for me. Jill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armstrong Posted January 21, 2016 Share Posted January 21, 2016 I think they are based on the keywords of the selected image. Finds images that have the most common keywords. All I know is that my zooms this month have been huge. So if that is because of my images showing under other people's zooms, great for me. Jill As far as I know it has been implemented today. So, has nothing to do with your zooms this month. I think they are based on the keywords of the selected image. Finds images that have the most common keywords. Yep, but which? Selected on what basis? I've found "similars" which didn't even had the main subject in their keywords. Result: totally irrelevant pictures pop up. Cheers, Philippe It could be automated image recognition software (same principle as Google Reverse Image Search). I looked at some of the obviously wrong alternate suggestions. On most I couldn't see any errant keywords that would lead to the suggestion. However some of the compositions made me think it might be imaged based grouping. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reimar Posted January 21, 2016 Share Posted January 21, 2016 I don't see any image similarities. It seems to be keyword-driven. A night shot of Toronto from the Island Yacht club brings up only one "similar" image that is a historic black and white line drawing of a yacht on the ocean. Not even close. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted January 21, 2016 Share Posted January 21, 2016 I don't see any image similarities. It seems to be keyword-driven. A night shot of Toronto from the Island Yacht club brings up only one "similar" image that is a historic black and white line drawing of a yacht on the ocean. Not even close. I agree it's definitely keyword driven. The trouble seems to be that too low an importance is given to the original keywords entered by the customer, and the "similars" results appear to be based on a new search using the keywords of the image the customer zoomed. Just leads the customer off at tangents, potentially away from what they are looking for. In the meantime the search engine is still broken (e.g. stone wall district lake = 4,196 results, but, stone wall lake district = 255 results with most images of stone walls in the Lake District missing). I wish Alamy would concentrate on fixing this serious problem, before creating more. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kathy deWitt Posted January 21, 2016 Share Posted January 21, 2016 Furthermore, if you click on one of these images that invites you to look at others pics, and you want to click on the EDIT BUTTON you have to scroll past loads of competing images that often have no connection with the search term to reach the bottom of the page! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted January 21, 2016 Share Posted January 21, 2016 Furthermore, if you click on one of these images that invites you to look at others pics, and you want to click on the EDIT BUTTON you have to scroll past loads of competing images that often have no connection with the search term to reach the bottom of the page! It feels like the only way Alamy can test out changes is using the live system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted January 21, 2016 Share Posted January 21, 2016 Just checked one of my St. Croix images. Underneath, well over 80 images and only 4 of them mine. I have at least 300 St. Croix images. Would be nice if under my main zoomed image, all of those underneath were mine, since I can easily fill that space. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duncan_Andison Posted January 22, 2016 Share Posted January 22, 2016 Just checked one of my St. Croix images. Underneath, well over 80 images and only 4 of them mine. I have at least 300 St. Croix images. Would be nice if under my main zoomed image, all of those underneath were mine, since I can easily fill that space. That is going to drive customers crazy. I mean, they've just searched through hundreds of images potentially and picked one to look at...... that gets lost amongst 80 other images?!?!? The volume of similar images is way out of control, as is there size. They also need to be more relevant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MariaJ Posted January 22, 2016 Share Posted January 22, 2016 I don't understand how this new display is helpful, with so many irrelevant images. I just looked up one of my images of a small rural orchard, D9X51C, and among the 70+ photos below it were images of the Eiffel Tower at night, soldiers in camouflage, a group of golf carts, and a bunch of Father Christmases. The only similarity I could find among the extra images was a line or lineup of items. There weren't any other images of the same location, which one might expect, and so none of my other images of the area. And also you have to scroll past all of those fair size images to get to the location, date, and description that I've included for my image. Seems like a lot of extra work for the customer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted January 22, 2016 Share Posted January 22, 2016 I zoomed a few more of my images, and some of them had no other images displayed below. Strange. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin P Wilson Posted January 22, 2016 Share Posted January 22, 2016 I zoomed a few more of my images, and some of them had no other images displayed below. Strange. Perhaps they are running some trials of customer reaction. It is not unusual to run different approaches to see what effect it has on customer take up, more reliable than asking them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Rooney Posted January 22, 2016 Share Posted January 22, 2016 Yes, Betty, it's inconsistent . . . and so mysterious. I rank this with the red flag as a major Alamy mistake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duncan_Andison Posted January 23, 2016 Share Posted January 23, 2016 Yes, Betty, it's inconsistent . . . and so mysterious. I rank this with the red flag as a major Alamy mistake. Done well it can be good but, as we often see at Alamy, they haven't spent enough time testing it or, thinking about how it looks. A few observations, from a design PoV... constructive criticism you may say. 1. Too many similar images displayed. 2. Similar Thumbnails look too big. They're often the same size as the image the client WANTs to see. Very distracting. 3. Metadata for the zoomed image appears way down below the similar images, completely detached from the image it relates to. 4. The partial caption under each image adds nothing but clutter. If you can't see it all why have it. It's not enough to understand what the image is.... "A something at......" "A plane flying across......." ?!? 5. Often there is a random image stuck on it's own line. Just lucks untidy and adds to the feel of clutter. 6. While we're at it, the pricing on the right of the zoomed image. There is large space between image size and price. If you reduce the column width you can give the Zoomed image a bit of a size boost. It is what the customer is most interested in so make it clearer. As it stands, visually, the image looks small against the payment info block Changes. 1. Two lines tops of similar images. Whether you have 1x8 of Similar images from same artist plus 1x8 from alternative artists is up to them but, I feel it would be a fairer way to split it. 2. Drop the text on the thumbnails and make sure a higher % of keywords match between the two files. At the moment I feel they may be relying on too few or only Essential keywords to determine a similar image. Either way, they need to be more relevant / accurate! 3. Make changes as suggested in (6) to give more space to the Zoomed Image. 4. Bring the metadata cut off at the bottom back up to the top where it should be. 5. Add a break/space between the last section of metadata on the zoomed image and the start of the similar images. 6. 2 lines of similar images, one from the same artist one from other artists using the current <h4> header settings separating the two lines. Yeah I know it will probably be dismissed as ideas coming from "A photographer" but it's just a thought, input from someone who used to spend a lot of time as a graphic designer / illustrator. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Crean Posted January 23, 2016 Share Posted January 23, 2016 Yes, Betty, it's inconsistent . . . and so mysterious. I rank this with the red flag as a major Alamy mistake. Done well it can be good but, as we often see at Alamy, they haven't spent enough time testing it or, thinking about how it looks. A few observations, from a design PoV... constructive criticism you may say. 1. Too many similar images displayed. 2. Similar Thumbnails look too big. They're often the same size as the image the client WANTs to see. Very distracting. 3. Metadata for the zoomed image appears way down below the similar images, completely detached from the image it relates to. 4. The partial caption under each image adds nothing but clutter. If you can't see it all why have it. It's not enough to understand what the image is.... "A something at......" "A plane flying across......." ?!? 5. Often there is a random image stuck on it's own line. Just lucks untidy and adds to the feel of clutter. 6. While we're at it, the pricing on the right of the zoomed image. There is large space between image size and price. If you reduce the column width you can give the Zoomed image a bit of a size boost. It is what the customer is most interested in so make it clearer. As it stands, visually, the image looks small against the payment info block Changes. 1. Two lines tops of similar images. Whether you have 1x8 of Similar images from same artist plus 1x8 from alternative artists is up to them but, I feel it would be a fairer way to split it. 2. Drop the text on the thumbnails and make sure a higher % of keywords match between the two files. At the moment I feel they may be relying on too few or only Essential keywords to determine a similar image. Either way, they need to be more relevant / accurate! 3. Make changes as suggested in (6) to give more space to the Zoomed Image. 4. Bring the metadata cut off at the bottom back up to the top where it should be. 5. Add a break/space between the last section of metadata on the zoomed image and the start of the similar images. 6. 2 lines of similar images, one from the same artist one from other artists using the current <h4> header settings separating the two lines. Yeah I know it will probably be dismissed as ideas coming from "A photographer" but it's just a thought, input from someone who used to spend a lot of time as a graphic designer / illustrator. You should get hired by Alamy immediately... Phil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duncan_Andison Posted January 23, 2016 Share Posted January 23, 2016 You should get hired by Alamy immediately... Phil Haha.... ahhh the days of graphic design, a2 pads, magic markers and storyboarding..... all changed of course, but after using the Wacom 27 cintiq & iPad Pro with the Apple pencil, I'd say it's for the better Web design can be tricky these days though, so many changes to take into account it can be a headache and as such, sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the design aesthetics when trying to workout the technical problems. One thing Alamy has done in the past, and that's listen. They tend to make changes afterwards (sometimes a little slowly) but often they do make the right corrections. Personally, when carrying out graphical changes to a site, I'd be tempted to create 1-3 mini test sites (basically 1 test site with 3 alternative CSS Style Sheets for different designs) that can be used by testers, photographers and customers and for them to provide feedback on the look and feel etc. A bit like Beta Testing but you do need to involve quite a few people and not just a dozen. But, I don't envy them the job of managing the database behind it all...... that must be quite a job! Respect. Edit..... although I do miss the smell and feel of using magic markers....there was always something special using them! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted January 23, 2016 Share Posted January 23, 2016 I zoomed a few more of my images, and some of them had no other images displayed below. Strange. Could it be that no one else has images that match the search terms you are using? Remarkably, I still have some images/subjects that no one else on Alamy has. When I search for them, zero similar images show up below. This leads me to believe that the search engine is coming up with similar images via keywords, not by some other "higher tech" means. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Robinson Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 Some very interesting 'similar results' coming up. I zoomed this one and this was the first of the 'similar stock photos': Both captions begin with 'Young', as do nearly all the other suggestions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duncan_Andison Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 If they don't correct it it will become counter productive. It's supposed to help buyers not get in their way. As it is, it will end up being ignored. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Lewis Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 Hi All Whatever you think about the new way of delivering results If you have low bandwidth it really SLOWS up the whole Alamy experience. Jon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted January 29, 2016 Author Share Posted January 29, 2016 Hi All Whatever you think about the new way of delivering results If you have low bandwidth it really SLOWS up the whole Alamy experience. Jon Yes. I don't think of myself as being particularly handicapped with my bandwidth but it sometimes takes a long time for all the "similar" images to load. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted January 30, 2016 Share Posted January 30, 2016 Just hit Esc after the main image has loaded. I have no problems on my Vista desktop, but on my Windows10 notebook the zoom pages certainly are sluggish. All those scripts don't help either. My download bandwidth is 46 Mpbs. The notebook obviously is on WiFi, which could be the culprit. Maybe don't think too much about all those clients not on our big western city sort of bandwidth. wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Robinson Posted January 30, 2016 Share Posted January 30, 2016 I've just discovered another downside. If you have zoomed one of your own images to edit the details, you have to scroll down past all the suggestions to get to the edit option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Lewis Posted January 30, 2016 Share Posted January 30, 2016 Hi Wikerkr My big western band width is 1.5Mbs not far from England's second city. Jon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.