News Upload Page/Options for Casual Uploaders of News

[Matt Ashmore 1,123]

I occasionally upload a news image taken on my iPhone via Stockimo.

 

Last week, for the first time ever, I uploaded a couple of 'UK Weather' related images taken on my DSLR.

It took me a few attempts to get the IPTC fields right and I had to email the Alamy News team on a couple of occasions to get them to fix images on the Live News Feed where I had got the captions wrong (missing).

This was mainly down to the fact that I struggled a bit to firstly find the right fields in Lightroom and then having added and IPTC caption and headline, I missed the fact that you actually had to to choose 'Save Metadata to File' from a menu.

And then I had to spend time looking up the actual structure that Alamy wants the caption text to be in. So I have it figured out now which is good so I should be OK in the future...

 

 

.. but it would have been far easier if the upload pages on Alamy had a couple of text fields to specify the headline, the caption, date taken (select from a calendar and default to 'today') and location when uploading news imagery. This would give Alamy's back end computer system handling Alamy's upload all the information to automatically generate the headline and caption IPTC fields in the format that Alamy require.

 

I do not see this as something that the serious news contributors would want to use (they would just continue to do what they do today)... but for contributors who supply news images on a more causal basis who just happen to be in the right places, at the right time with a camera in hand, I think this would be very useful. Maybe it's something that Alamy can add as part of their updates to the contributor tools!

Edited May 20, 2016 by Matt Ashmore